Offshore 80%
The percentage of global offshore wind resources that are in areas where water depth is greater than 60–70m.
World Bank
In addition to the conventional challenges facing a start-up company, there were also a number of unforeseen obstacles that arose in the course of the development process. “During the execution of the PivotBuoy project,” Neves says, “there was the pandemic, and then there was a volcano in the Canary Islands. It was not on the same island that we [were] in, but it meant that a lot of the offshore suppliers dropped everything that they were doing – of course, as you’d expect – and went to help these islands build emergency stations and water desalination plants and things that were urgent.” Due to these unforeseeable events, X1 wind had to work through a lack of supplier availability during this period.
Restrictions around permits can also pose an issue in the offshore wind industry – but this is a challenge that seems to have been generative for X1 Wind. “The government issues plans of maritime spatial planning – which is where they map bio- sensitive habitats, shipping routes, minimum distance to shore, and so on – and we take the areas which are not under any of these constraints,” Neves explains. “In this process, a lot of communities are involved. So, right now, we are starting those processes for the new project in the south of France and we are talking to local communities, to fisheries and to the tourism community, because you have a lot of sailing there,
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which is close to shore. You start understanding what the challenges are that might come from communities; and then you try to solve them.”
Learn from the past
From design, to engineering, to installation and operation – isolating challenges and finding ways to solve them is at the heart of everything that X1 Wind do. But, while the company knows that it is pioneering new approaches to offshore wind power, it also knows that it stands on the shoulders of earlier innovators. “They’ve really opened up an industry that didn’t exist 10 years ago,” Neves says. “Those technologies have been pioneering and they’ve been working well. Our view is not that there is no space for them, or that they are not economically feasible – it is that there are still efficiencies to be gained because it’s still a young industry. And we believe that our structure brings some of those efficiencies.” As Neves notes, a lot can change in ten years and, indeed, so it has. Once dismissed as an unrealistic fantasy, floating offshore wind platforms are beginning to look like a viable – not to mention economical and sustainable – option. X1 Wind may still have a ways to go before their single-moored structure is commercially approved, but one thing looks certain – the Barcelona-based developers are ready to take on the challenge. ●
11/3/2022 2:40:53 PM World Wind Technology /
www.worldwind-technology.com
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