By Carrie Cox

There is immense potential for Australia to leap ahead of the early pioneers in offshore renewable energy development.

At least from where he’s standing, Dr Wenhua Zhao sees a curious link between the recent global pandemic and the emergence of offshore renewable energy infrastructure.

Just before COVID-19, whenever Dr Zhao from the Oceans Graduate School would propose his ideas about offshore renewables for Australia, people would look at him askance. “They might think it sounded crazy,” he says. “We have so much land here — why would you need to go offshore?”

Fast forward a handful of COVID-19 years and the world is pursuing offshore renewables at pace and the Australian Research Council has just given Dr Zhao almost $1 million to develop precise prediction models to enable the economically viable development of offshore renewable energy infrastructure.

A mere coincidence of timing or did COVID-19 rewire global thought? “It’s hard to know for sure,” Dr Zhao says, “but it does seem like we were simply more driven by purely economic motivations before the pandemic. It was easy to just keep doing what we were doing — there was no time to stop and think. But then everything just stopped. And now the feedback for our ideas is that the time is now right.”

Significantly, the International Energy Agency reports that new offshore wind installations increased six-fold from 2020 to 2021, even with pandemic-induced supply chain challenges and construction delays hampering the effort. Europe led the early charge, however the Asia-Pacific has recently surged forward, with major developments going ahead in China, followed by Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. 

But it’s Australia that arguably has the greatest potential to become a global leader in offshore renewables. Our vast coastline provides enormous opportunities for infrastructure development, while our abundant wind and solar resources are the envy of the world. In terms of wind alone, the Global Wind Energy Council estimates Australia has the potential to generate up to 5000 gigawatts of electricity — or 100 times the capacity of the nation’s two largest electricity networks — from offshore developments using a combination of fixed and floating infrastructure.

Moreover, our own relatively small population means that any commercially viable energy generation industry has immediate export potential. If we can get it right, it’s worth doing, as the Federal Government now agrees, having lifted the ban on offshore turbines in late 2021 and identified six offshore wind zones around the country.

As Dr Zhao observes, with government support comes the possibility for real momentum. “With that support, it’s conceivable to talk about a commercially viable offshore energy industry being up and running within five to 10 years,” he says. “The fundamentals are already there, especially here in WA where we are so strong in offshore technology and we already have the supply chains through LNG and the close proximity to our markets. We are already known to be a reliable energy supplier.”

The kicker, of course, is cost. While renewable energy targets are no longer a nice-to-have, no country is going to support an energy industry for which the numbers simply don’t add up. It’s this imperative that makes Dr Zhao’s $944,606 ARC project so important. Over the next four years he is charged with developing the advanced hydrodynamic knowledge base to design cost-efficient offshore wind, floating solar and aquaculture infrastructure to accelerate the development of offshore renewable energy in Australia.

“Ocean waves keep impacting structures over time and can induce a lot of damage, so the challenge is to design infrastructure that can reliably stand there for 20-25 years,” Dr Zhao explains. “You can simply make the strongest structure possible, but that’s likely to involve a lot of expensive material. A much smarter approach is to identify the key parameters affecting the performance of a structure in particular conditions and use advanced hydrodynamic technology to design bespoke structures that are reliable and cost-efficient. It’s a very different approach to existing oil and gas platforms.”

“The fundamentals are already there, especially here in WA. We are already known to be a reliable energy supplier.”

Dr Wenhua Zhao

 

And it’s not enough to simply transpose what offshore pioneers have successfully constructed overseas. “WA has its own unique sea environment,” Dr Zhao says. “For instance, swells with long wave periods are common in these waters. Structures have to be designed for those wave periods, otherwise they could excite very strong responses that are harmful.”

That said, Dr Zhao says it’s still vital to collaborate with other countries making inroads in offshore development. “Structure-wise, there are a few types in the ocean now, mostly in the northern hemisphere, and it’s helpful to work with other countries to learn what’s working and what isn’t. Ultimately we’d like to develop a concept that takes the best of what already exists and then accounts for our own environment.”

While the go-to offshore renewable option is wind, Dr Zhao’s work will form a research resource for any new offshore infrastructure development because, as he explains, they all come back to the same initial challenge: how a structure interacts with ocean waves. “Fundamentally they’re all the same in that sense,” he explains. “This research will make it possible to forecast or simulate for any type of offshore structure and ultimately form the basis of future industry guidelines. That’s a key outcome for this project and essential for the economically viable development of marine renewable energy.”

For all the movement now happening in the offshore energy space, some may still question the wisdom of it for a country with so much land mass. But offshore energy generation has some advantages over onshore that are difficult to ignore. For a start, wind is generally much stronger and consistent out at sea and has fewer impediments. Its capacity has also been proven to be greater – typically in the order of 10 to 15 per cent, according to research done by the Blue Economy Cooperative Research Centre.

And, as Dr Zhao explains, when it comes to wind turbines, bigger is better, or at least cheaper. “To reduce the relative cost of electricity, you need to have bigger and bigger turbines, and it’s very difficult to do that logistically on land in terms of delivery and transport,” he says. “For a structure that’s 100m long, for example — the same length as a football field — you couldn’t use conventional road routes for transport. But for an offshore turbine, you can build it in a shipyard and then put it on a ship out into the ocean.”

At any rate, comparisons now seem beside the point: both onshore and offshore energy developments will need to be part of Australia’s diversified energy landscape to accelerate the transition to renewables. Time is of the essence, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told an energy conference in September: “This is a decade in which we either move forward and seize the opportunities which are there, or the world will just go past us.”

Read the full issue of the Summer 2023 edition of Uniview [Accessible PDF 15Mb].