Will Floating Turbines Usher in a New Wave of Offshore Wind? - Yale E360
https://e360.yale.edu/features/will-floating-turbines-usher-in-a-new-wave-of-offshore-wind
“Floating wind power has enormous potential to be a core technology for reaching the climate goals in Europe and around the world,” says Frank Adam, an expert on wind energy technology at the University of Rostock in Germany.
The ocean space beyond the reach of conventional offshore turbines makes up 80 percent of the world’s maritime waters, opening the way for floating arrays, Adam says. “In the past few years this technology has made great strides, and Hywind shows that it can work as a whole park,” says Adam. “Now the farms have to grow bigger to show governments and investors that they’re feasible on a really large scale.”
Some renewable energy experts remain skeptical that the high costs of floating offshore wind turbines — currently the electricity they generate is often almost twice as expensive as near-shore wind turbines and three times that of land-based wind turbines — will come down far enough to rival other clean-energy technologies.
“It will always be cheaper to build turbines on land, and that is where the [emissions-reduction] targets are going to have to be reached,” says R. Andreas Kraemer, founder and director emeritus of the Ecologic Institute, a Berlin-based think tank. “Even though the floating parks may be cheaper in some cases than fixed offshore wind power plants, and deployable over a larger sea area, it is still maritime engineering — and that makes it expensive to build, deploy, and maintain. Lifespans of the stations are short because of the corrosive nature of the marine environment.”
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But advocates of floating wind arrays note that the costs of onshore and near-shore wind energy have been steadily falling as the efficiency of these technologies has been rising; the same trends, they contend, are likely to lower the costs of floating offshore wind
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Po Wen Cheng, head of an international research project on floating wind energy at the University of Stuttgart, says that floating turbines could produce more energy than the largest onshore or offshore technologies. Not only are winds in deeper waters more powerful than those closer to shore, he says, but the physics of the flexible, suspended rigs enables them to carry larger turbines. “The bigger the turbine, the more energy they can produce in the right conditions,” he says. Cheng argues that floating turbines could be even taller than today’s largest offshore rigs, perhaps with 400-foot blades and towers stretching nearly 1,000 feet into the air — as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Turbines of such dimensions could generate three times the electricity of today’s most advanced onshore turbines, says Cheng.
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Investors and renewable energy companies say that the most formidable hurdle to full-scale rollout of floating wind arrays is recognition from governments, utilities, and financiers that the technology is viable and that costs will inevitably fall. “We need commitments from governments, the way France, Scotland, and Japan have done, to help get bigger floating parks off the ground,” says Bruno Geschier, chief sales and marketing officer of Ideol, a multinational offshore wind developer.
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the promise of harnessing so much of the open seas for renewable energy generation remains an enticing proposition. As the IEA has noted, in theory, offshore wind power alone could eventually meet the entire electricity needs of Europe, the U.S., and Japan many times over.