Morning
Overview’s Everett Sloane, with help from AI, just published an informative
article about Equinor’s Hywind Tampen floating offshore wind project in the
deep waters of the Norwegian Sea. About 140 kilometers off the Norwegian coast,
there are 11 wind turbines deployed in open ocean where the seabed is much
deeper than the roughly 60-meter depth limit that conventional,
bolted-to-the-seabed offshore wind farms require. The floating turbines are “mounted
on a spar-buoy hull anchored by mooring lines, riding swells that would topple
any fixed foundation.”
The Hywind Tampen project,
with 11 floating turbines, has a combined capacity of 88MW. It became the
world’s largest floating offshore wind farm, and now it is proving that
floating offshore wind is a viable technology that can withstand the rough sea
conditions that deeper water facilities may encounter. The strongest and
steadiest offshore winds occur further offshore, where these floating turbines
can harness them.
Below are some technical
resource assessments from NREL for U.S. offshore wind, including both areas
where an attached substructure is viable and where floating wind is required
due to depth. Adding in the floating wind potential, the total wind technical
resource is more than doubled. Globally, the potential technical resource of
floating wind dwarfs that of wind potential requiring substructures.
The Hywind Tampen project
supplies electricity to the Snorre and Gullfaks oil and gas platforms,
offsetting some of the natural gas used by them to run their operations.
“The spar-buoy hulls, each ballasted to stay upright in
North Sea storms, demonstrate that floating structures can support full-size
turbines (8.6 MW each) and keep them generating through harsh conditions.”
As of yet, there are still
many unknowns about floating wind potential. One thing to keep in mind is that
as facilities move further offshore, this means longer and more transmission
cables are needed. This increases cost, increases transmission losses, and may
have more ecological effects for organisms on the seabed. Sloane lists some of
the unknowns below:
In the offshore waters of the
U.S., there is some leasing via the Bureau of Ocean Management and some
potential projects moving forward, particularly off the Pacific coast of
Oregon and California, where waters are too deep for fixed turbines.
“Developers including Equinor, RWE, and a joint venture
between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and others have secured leases or
expressed interest in West Coast sites. On the East Coast, the Gulf of Maine
has emerged as another focal area, with the state of Maine and federal agencies
coordinating research into floating technology suited to its deep, cold waters.”
While these projects are
moving forward slowly, it will be several years before the U.S. has a floating offshore wind project deployed and in production.
“The physical resource is well characterized. The
economic and ecological dimensions are not. Hywind Tampen and the handful of
smaller floating pilots that preceded it, including the WindFloat Atlantic
project off Portugal, have shown that the engineering works. What comes next
depends on cable costs, permitting speed, supply-chain investment, and
political will. The wind is there. The question is whether everything else can
catch up.”
References:
A
floating offshore wind farm just started sending power ashore from water too
deep to anchor anything — opening trillions of watts of ocean wind to the grid.
Everett Sloane. Morning Overview. June 1, 2026. A
floating offshore wind farm just started sending power ashore from water too
deep to anchor anything — opening trillions of watts of ocean wind to the grid
Offshore
Wind Energy Technical Potential for the Contiguous United States. Anthony
Lopez, Rebecca Green, Travis Williams, Eric Lantz, Grant Buster, and Billy
Roberts. National renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). August 15th, 2022. Offshore Wind Energy
Technical Potential for the Contiguous United States
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