Wave Performance Study of a Rapidly Deployable and Foldable Offshore Floating Photovoltaic System

Abstract

Based on completed and planned installed capacity, offshore photovoltaics (PV) have emerged as a new form of “Marine plus Renewable Energy” productivity, ranking second only to offshore wind power in China. Existing offshore floating PV solutions typically adopt semi-submersible platform derived from the traditional marine engineering industry, with a few based on overseas thin-film technologies.  Conventional solutions suffer from several limitations: (1) semi-submersible platforms are large and heavy, with complex construction organization, low efficiency, high costs, strong dependence on nearshore fabrication sites and marine engineering production capacity; (2) transport efficiency is low, with only hundreds of kilowatts per shipment (compared to megawatts per shipment for offshore wind); and (3) thin-film solutions rely on non-standard, customized PV modules. To address these challenges, a rapidly deployable and foldable offshore floating photovoltaic system TK-FFPV has been developed, based on first-principles thinking and the KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid) design philosophy. By leveraging prefabrication, modularization, and foldable structures, TK-FFPV transforms the high-risk, costly, and complex outdoor construction paradigm of large marine engineering equipment into a safe, economical, and efficient indoor intelligent manufacturing model for small electromechanical equipment. The approach is more conducive to exploiting industrial supply chain advantages, enabling large-scale deployment and export, reducing costs, improving efficiency, and accelerating the development of offshore PV. This paper presents the real-sea field tests conducted for the wave performance of TK-FFPV system.