RENEWABLES Ӏ OFFSHORE WIND


oFFSHoRE WIND'S RISING TIDE


This year the world’s installed wind-powered generation capacity is set to pass the


one-terawatt mark with the greatest growth coming from offshore windfarms. The potential for floating offshore wind in Europe, the US and Japan is estimated in the region of 7 TW. Construction is happening at almost breakneck speed. Julian Champkin reports.


Talk sustainable energy sources – wind, solar, hydro, tidal, geothermal, perhaps nuclear – and wind power is the most


Mammoet’s


SK6000 will unlock lifting power for floating windfarms


visible of them. It is also the one that, arguably, offers the most immediate, and one hopes heartening, progress towards large


scale green energy supply. This is particularly true of offshore wind where the towers and blades used can be several times greater than their onshore cousins. Jackets and monopiles are reaching both heights and weights that are pushing the capacity of lifting apparatus to the limits. We wrote recently, in the dockside lifting feature in our June 2023 issue, about how dockside installations have been increasing in size and capacity to manage the ever- increasing lifting demands of offshore installations. We make no apology about returning to the subject here. Climate change, and the energy transition that perhaps may limit it, is a defining challenge of our time. The progress, the scale, indeed the speed of development here is immense and lifting companies are at the forefront of it. One consequence of their


efforts is that the costs per generated gigawatt of offshore windfarm installation have fallen by more than 60% over the past three years (source: industry body Wind Europe). A significant bottleneck, though, is the availability of dockside installations that can handle the huge components.


28 CRANES TODAY


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