Offshore wind turbines will soon power electrolysers that split seawater into hydrogen, but the risks of doing this at sea—from corrosion to leaks to public opposition—remain poorly understood. The WINDHY project brings together engineers, social scientists, and safety experts from 13 countries to identify what can go wrong when producing hydrogen directly at offshore wind farms. Current knowledge about accidents is scattered across isolated databases in different sectors and regions, and public concerns about offshore hydrogen have not been systematically surveyed. The project will run a global survey across all participating countries to understand those perceptions, interconnect accident data from multiple industries, and evaluate the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of each new technology option. If successful, the project will produce a risk management framework and a digital support tool for the new production equipment and process. This could help developers, regulators, and insurers make decisions about where and how to build offshore hydrogen systems—reducing the chance of failures that could delay the rollout of a clean fuel intended to replace natural gas in heavy industry and shipping. The work is applied, not fundamental science: it aims to produce immediately usable guidance for an emerging energy supply chain.
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The WINDHY project focuses on the novel production phase of offshore wind-powered green hydrogen as a new energy solution, where the main tasks include obtaining electricity from offshore wind turbines, utilizing electrolysis to derive hydrogen from water, transferring hydrogen to a certain energy carrier, and injecting the hydrogen carrier into a designated transportation mechanism. Many new technologies are under consideration and development for this process, and each of them has own advantages and limitations, as well as varying risks to operators, communities, and the environment. The WINDHY project aims to utilize cross-industry knowledge worldwide and global evidence to understand the risky issues that threaten the stability, safety, and sustainability of offshore wind-powered hydrogen production, and integrate multi-disciplinary expertise to control and mitigate risks of the new process and value chain of offshore wind-powered hydrogen production. The WINDHY project builds a multidisciplinary consortium, with five MS/AC partners, and eight TC partners from 13 countries in all continents. It designs a staff exchange programme with 263 person-months for secondments realized in six work-packages. Through the secondments, and diverse networking activities, the project is expected to conduct a global survey in all participating countries to understand public perceptions and concerns on risky issues, interconnect knowledge about accidents in isolated databases in multiple sectors and regions, evaluates different aspects of social-, economic-, and environmental sustainability of new technologies, and develop a risk management framework with digital supporting tool for the new production equipment and process. The project follows the open science policy with a dedicated data management plan, and aims to develop skills of participating researchers, and improve R&I potential of Europe in offshore renewable energy.
Ben Matellini (Co-Investigator)Eddie Blanco-Davis (Co-Investigator)Jin Wang (Principal Investigator)Trung Thanh Nguyen (Co-Investigator)Zaili Yang (Co-Investigator)
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