Socio-economic Analysis of a Selected Multi-use Offshore Site in the North Sea

A 600 MW offshore wind farm is under construction in the Netherlands Exclusive Economic Zone at a site called Gemini situated 55 km north of the Wadden Sea island of Schiermonnikoog and 85 km from the nearest Dutch port of Eemshaven. This chapter investigates the option of introducing a multi-use design for the Gemini site by adding mussel cultivation (48 kt wet weight per year) and seaweed cultivation (480 kt wet weight per year) to the wind farm. An institutional analysis indicates a political will in the Netherlands to support the development of adding uses to offshore wind farms, but a number of implementation obstacles are also identified. Those obstacles include an absence of licences for multi-use production and legal restrictions against third-party access to wind farms. There is therefore a need for a regulatory framework for multi-use and trust-building among actors involved in multi-use installations. A financial and economic assessment, and a cost-benefit analysis also taking into account monetized changes in CO2 emissions, indicate that adding mussel cultivation to the wind farm is likely to be both financially and socio-economically viable. Including a seaweed cultivation function is probably not financially and socio-economically viable under current technical and economic conditions. Knowledge gaps and uncertainties in these assessments with respect to, for example, missing site-specific data and non-monetized externalities suggest further research, also including pilot cultivations of mussels and seaweed in planned single-use or multi-use installations