Sustainability Assessment of Floating Solar-Wind Hybrids in China and Europe

The shift to coastal renewables presents two linked challenges: sustaining project profitability and using limited grid export capacity efficiently. This thesis develops and applies a data-driven techno-economic framework for co-located floating photovoltaic (FPV) and offshore wind (OWT) hybrids. Using ERA5 irradiance, hub-height wind, and wave fields together with GEBCO bathymetry, the workflow models FPV and OWT hourly outputs, aggregates them to a hybrid series, and applies an export-capacity limit to quantify curtailment and grid utilization. A transparent site-selection scorecard—covering resource quality, solar–wind complementarity, depth/bathymetry, distance to port/grid, and constraints or policy risk—ensures two study nodes (in China and in Europe) are buildable and comparable. The objectives are to provide a reproducible pipeline from open data to hybrid LCOE; quantify complementarity and grid use; compute AEP, capacity factor, and LCOE for FPV, OWT, and the hybrid under shared assumptions; deliver a China–Europe comparison with a documented scorecard, and test sensitivities to WACC, CAPEX/OPEX, and availability. The results offer actionable evidence for site selection and hybrid sizing, and clarify how policy and grid constraints shape techno-economic outcomes in coastal systems.