Page 12: of Marine Technology Magazine (January 2022)

SUBSEA PROCESSING

FUTURE FLOATING

Photo courtesy Aker Offshore Wind

POWERHOUSES

From being an ugly duckling, ? oating offshore wind is now the

Cinderella of the offshore renewables world. Attention is now being paid to ? oating and even subsea substation concepts to help bring this power to shore. Elaine Maslin reports.

ver the past year, expectations around the growth the carbon free energy mix, initially close to shore, within 20- in the ? oating offshore wind development have 30km, but the next stage will be signi? cantly bigger in scale grown, signi? cantly. Many are piling into the mar- and in deeper water. Once you go to 100m water depth, it’s ex-

O ket, seeing that it could give them a chance to ramp pected that ? oating substations will be used to collect, convert up renewables capacity quickly, with 15MW turbines on the and transmit high voltage power to shore because, at those horizon and the possibility of GW-scale projects looming by water depths, ? xed structures will become relatively large and the end of the decade. heavy. Because of the increased wave load, they will need a

Much has been said about the different ? oating turbine con- bigger footprint and the natural period of the structure and cepts. However, there’s also thought going into ? oating and fatigue become more important.” seabed substations, to help corral and then boost the voltage For countries like Japan and the US west coast, where depths of the power to a level useful enough to export it to where drop to 700 – 900m quickly, ? oating will be a necessity, if it’s needed. they want to build out offshore wind at scale. In fact, Japan

Consultant Justin Jones at engineering ? rm Petrofac says: has already trialed a small, 25MVA, 1,00-tonne ? oating trans- “Floating wind farms are going to be a major contributor to former at the Fukushima Forward project. Installed in 2013, 12 January/February 2022

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