PhD project granted for Vakis and Jayawardhana in PhD@sea programme

The Boards of the NWO domains Science and Social Science and Humanities have approved a project proposal in the PhD@sea programme. For this programme NWO works together with the Topsector Energy on cross-disciplinary research projects that can help realise the planning, operation and maintenance of offshore wind farms.

The project titled Facilitating Large Scale Offshore Wind Production by Developing Offshore Storage and Transport Alternatives is coordinated by Prof Martha Roggenkamp of the Faculty of Law (University of Groningen) and will fund 4 PhD projects. The project analyses the feasibility of implementing offshore energy storage through electrical pumped storage and hydrogen conversion and of novel methods to transport electricity and/or hydrogen to shore in the Dutch North Sea. Feasibility is studied from a technical, market, legal/regulatory and spatial perspective, targeting joined interdisciplinary policy recommendations.  

The PhD project supervised by Profs A. Vakis and B. Jayawardhana of the Engineering and Technology Institute Groningen (ENTEG) focusses on the development of predictive models of the Ocean Grazer's novel pumped-hydro offshore storage technology and use these for purposes of optimization, health monitoring and predictive maintenance. Overall, the proposal has four goals:

• model and optimize energy harvesting, power production, onsite storage utilization and balancing of collection cables in a hybrid offshore wind farm (A. Vakis and B. Jayawardhana);

• identify the optimal design and operation of an offshore system for hydrogen production and transport using offshore wind (M. Gibescu, University of Utrecht);

• identify key legal obstacles and suggest legal changes in order to facilitate and govern offshore electricity storage with a transparent storage regime as well as alternative transport options (M.M. Roggenkamp, Law, RUG); and,

• identify the institutional innovations for marine spatial planning and associated (environmental) procedures for allocating offshore storage (C. Zuidema, Spacial Sciences,  RUG).

About PhD@Sea
The thematic programme PhD@Sea is part of the Knowledge and Innovation Contract for 2018-2019. The two NWO domains Science and Social Sciences and Humanities have set up this public-private programme as a contribution to research in the Topsector Energy. The programme focuses on cross-disciplinary research projects across a range of disciplines, including science, technology, ecology, humanities and the social sciences.