Environmental Observations at the First Offshore Solar Farm in the North Sea

Offshore solar emergence is driven by a lack of available land and the immense decarbonisation targets. It is a promising area of solar photovoltaic application, with multiple benefits when co-located with offshore wind, and with almost unlimited potential for nations living close to the sea. Research to understand the environmental implications of offshore solar must be carried out in parallel with the realization of the first pilot demonstrations. Such pilots provide important opportunities to learn to collect field data that can be used to verify untested assumptions about possible negative and positive impacts on the marine ecosystem and serve as input data for models that can forecast the effects of much larger-scale offshore solar. This paper reports on (1) the monitoring methods and first results of water quality parameters collected underneath a small (50 kWp and 400 m2) floating solar farm and at a reference location in the open sea; (2) observations of birds on top of the floating solar platforms and (3) biogeochemistry characteristics of the seabed around the solar farm. Both the water quality and the seabed characteristics studied here did not show a clear trend or deviation from normal conditions. The observations of birds on the floating platform were first-of-its-kind; no comparison is made to other floating infrastructure or other locations. Useful insights were gathered with respect to monitoring approaches around floating solar structures in high wave conditions.