OFFSHORE & SUBSEA | APPLICATION REPORT
STRONG WINDS, HEAVIER LIFTS
The newest developments in offshore lifting nowadays are in the wind energy field. As turbines get heavier, blades get longer and towers get higher, demands on lifting technology increase. Julian Champkin reports.
same thing would have been primarily true, though offshore wind farms might have got a brief mention. Today this article is almost entirely about lifting for the offshore wind industry. The reasons for the change are clear: the engineering challenges that faced offshore oil and gas exploration in its early days were huge. How, actually, in real life do you drill a hole into the seabed a hundred metres below the surface of the storm- swept North Sea, and insert a pipe into that hole, and get the gas or oil that comes out of that pipe safely ashore? Nothing remotely like it had ever been done before.
T
en years ago any article about maritime and offshore lifting would have been about oil and gas. Even five years ago the
If today we take the achievements of the offshore fossil fuel industry for granted it is only through over-familiarity: we ought still to marvel at the complexity, the power, the sheer size of a floating oil rig and at the cumulative human ingenuity that went into creating it and getting it into position 50 miles out to sea, and anchoring it there to float and function as we want it to. Offshore wind is in the same position of
novelty and of challenge today. The towers are huge: 60 metres meters tall in the early days, General Electric’s latest Halaide-X design has blades 107 metres long whose tips sweep 260 metres above the sea surface. How exactly do you lift the tower for such a thing from a dock onto a ship, then at sea lift it again, tilt it upright, lower it down to the seabed and secure it?
And having done that, how do you then attach three 100-plus-metre blades to its nacelle, from a vessel that is bobbing around in fair weather (we hope) all that distance below the attachment point? For windfarms on land it is a challenge, requiring new cranes and techniques; for offshore farms the towers are roughly twice as high and the challenges – shall we call them 20 times as great? Which of course is why they are
interesting. The technologies are new and big and ingenious. And offshore wind is also a boom industry as well as a challenging one.
MARKET The 2022 offshore wind market report from the US Office of Energy Efficiency and
R The Horns windfarm, 30 km off the Danish coast 40 | November 2022 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
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