Dutch floating power hub for remote subsea assets secures €3.2M gov’t push

June 26, 2026, by Nadja Skopljak

Dutch offshore floating solar company SolarDuck and the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) have secured a €3.2 million subsidy from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) to develop an offshore floating power hub for remote subsea assets.

The Steady Seas research program will advance the foundational design of SolarDuck’s Offshore Floating Power & Utility Hub (OFPH), a single-platform offshore solar solution developed to provide power, communications and other utilities to remote offshore and subsea assets.

The OFPH is a redeployable offshore platform that generates renewable power where needed, supporting continuous operations through integrated energy storage and auxiliary systems, which has the potential to reduce the lifecycle costs of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and subsea tie-back projects and consequently unlock investment opportunities, SolarDuck said.

The Steady Seas project combines applied research and technology development to address key technical questions for the hub, including hydrodynamic performance, mooring and motion behaviour, integration of power and communication systems and the interface with subsea infrastructure.

According to the Dutch firm, the program will translate lessons from earlier offshore solar pilots into a robust basic design for a sector-specific platform that can support offshore oil & gas, CCS and other remote offshore applications.

The program builds on the operational experience and data gathered through SolarDuck’s DEI+ Merganser project in the Dutch North Sea.

Don Hoogendoorn, CTO of SolarDuck, said: “Steady Seas allows us to take the lessons learned from building and testing Merganser in the North Sea and apply them to a design tailored for single-platform offshore applications. The technical challenges of powering assets far offshore are significant, from mooring and motion behaviour to integration with subsea infrastructure. This programme gives us the means to engineer and validate robust answers before the solution is deployed at sea.”

SolarDuck will lead the overall OFPH design and system integration, while MARIN will contribute hydrodynamic analysis, simulations, and basin testing to validate the platform’s behavior, reliability and wave response under realistic offshore conditions.

After the research phase, demonstration projects in collaboration with industry partners will take place. Joint industry projects are currently being established to test the hub in operational offshore conditions and validate its ability to power and control remote assets in real-life environments.

“We are proud to continue our collaboration with SolarDuck and to support the further maturation of offshore floating photovoltaics,” said William Otto of MARIN.

“Within Steady Seas, MARIN will investigate the impact of the topology on behaviour and hydrodynamic coefficients, and it will assess the impact of extreme wave conditions on structural loading, including wave build-up beneath the platform. This kind of rigorous, test-driven validation is essential to bring offshore solar technology confidently toward commercial deployment.”