floating offshore wind More floating platforms taking to the water
Floating platforms for offshore wind turbines are being developed in increasingly large numbers as recognition grows of the role they can play reducing the cost of offshore wind energy
RECENT weeks have seen a number of important milestones in the development of the next generation of platforms for floating offshore wind turbines. In July 2014, it was announced that an engineering design study for the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) in the UK by Glosten Associates, using Glosten’s innovative tension leg floating platform (TLP), has demonstrated that the company’s PelaStar TLP could play a major role in reducing the cost of offshore wind. It is estimated that the UK has over a third of Europe’s
potential offshore wind resource – enough to power the country nearly three times over. Developing solutions that enable this power to be affordably tapped will require significant technology developments, and floating wind could be a solution. The study showed that UK offshore
wind energy costs could fall to as little as £85 per megawatt/hour (MWh) by the mid-2020s, with further reductions possible as the technology matures. The floating platform is designed to provide high capacity factors in wind speeds
exceeding 10m per second in water between 60m and 1,200m deep. The TLP is suitable for water depths from as little as 55m (which is much shallower than a conventional TLP developed from oil and gas experience) up to several hundred metres. William Hurley, Glosten project
manager, said the company had completed a substantial amount of engineering, design and model testing, as well as project execution planning and installation engineering, and was pleased to find the results validated earlier work. “It shows a highly promising path for the industry to achieve – and exceed – cost targets for the end of the decade and beyond to make it a commercially attractive option. We are ready for a full-scale 6 megawatt (MW) demonstration project,” he said. Andrew Scott, a programme manager
for offshore renewables at the ETI, said the study had shown the potential for
Hexicon and SSAB are working together on the optimisation of the former’s multi-turbine floating platforms
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