Page 4: of Marine Technology Magazine (October 2010)

Funding Available

Carbon Trust Launches

Technical Challenge

The Carbon Trust launched a global competition to find world-leading solutions to the problem of transferring engineers and equipment safely from boats to wind tur- bines as far as 300km offshore in 3m wave heights. The project aims to improve the economics of offshore wind by boosting revenues by as much as £3bn at a crucial time for the next generation of Round 3 offshore wind farms. The competition aims to generate at least a 4% increase in tur- bine availability through the development of new tech- nologies for the most challenging sea conditions. This in turn could increase the power generated, which would mean saving £3bn of lost revenue. This improvement in availability would also save an extra 1.3 Mt CO2 per year.

The next generation of ‘Round 3’ offshore wind farms to be constructed from 2014 will consist of up to 1,500 tur- bines, located up to 300 km offshore. By enabling safe transfer to a turbine in 3m waves through the develop- ment of new systems, the increased potential for mainte- nance will improve availability.

The competition is part of the Carbon Trust’s Offshore

Wind Accelerator, a major industry collaboration with eight leading energy companies – DONG Energy, E.ON,

Mainstream Renewable Power, RWE Innogy,

ScottishPower Renewables, SSE Renewables, Statkraft and

Statoil – which aims to drive down the costs of energy from offshore wind by 10%.

This latest OWA global competition aims to identify and develop the necessary technologies for access of far-off- shore wind turbines, focusing on: • Transfer systems • Vessels • Launch and recovery systems

The successful applicants to the competition will benefit from funding of up to £100,000 per concept to support the design and development of the successful concepts; the opportunity to work with eight leading offshore wind developers with licences to develop 30GW of offshore wind capacity in UK waters (representing 60% of today’s licensed UK capacity) and potentially several million pounds of funding to take the concepts to full-scale demonstration. The competition is supported by

RenewableUK, IMarEST, RINA, SMI & EWEA.

Companies interested can submit their designs until 5pm, November 26, 2010, by visiting www.carbontrust.co.uk/access or

Emailing: OWA@ carbontrust.co.uk