![]() ![]() Scotland, which aspires to cover all of its electricity needs with renewables this year, has other new floating parks in the works, including one just south of Hywind Scotland. It has dedicated sites and price supports for wind farms off the shores of Brittany and the Mediterranean coast. France has floating wind power written into its clean energy plans and says it aims to be a world leader in deploying the technology. In Portugal, the WindFloat Atlantic project, now under construction, is expected to produce enough power for 60,000 homes when it is completed later this year. Other floating wind projects, some with turbines larger than Hywind, are now being built in Europe and Japan. The Hywind Scotland array – 75% owned by the Norwegian firm Equinor, formerly Statoil – has been in operation for nearly three years and remained afloat and generating power during Hurricane Ophelia in 2017 and throughout other harsh winter storms with 100mph (160km/h) winds and 27ft (8m) waves. “Now the farms have to grow bigger to show governments and investors that they’re feasible on a really large scale.”īut 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. “In the past few years this technology has made great strides, and Hywind shows that it can work as a whole park,” says Adam. The ocean space beyond the reach of conventional offshore turbines makes up 80% of the world’s maritime waters, opening the way for floating arrays, Adam says. “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. ![]() In Europe, where the density of onshore and near-shore wind turbines in places like Germany, the United Kingdom, and Norway has spurred increasing opposition to new arrays, the floating turbines can be installed over the horizon, out of sight of coastal residents. In contrast to ordinary offshore wind turbines, with long towers sunk into the seabed and bolted into place in shallow seas 60-160 ft (18-48.5m) deep, the advantage of floating turbines is that they can access large swathes of outlying ocean waters, up to half a mile deep, where the world’s strongest and most consistent winds blow. The turbines’ nearly 10,000-ton cylindrical bases are held in place with three taut mooring cables attached to anchors, which lie on the sea floor. What’s groundbreaking about the Hywind project, located in more than 300ft (90m) of water, is that the giant masts and turbines sit in buoyant concrete-and-steel keels that enable them to stand upright on the water, much like a fishing buoy. Proponents say the technology heralds a new generation of green energy. Indeed, Hywind Scotland, which generates enough electricity for more than 20,000 homes, is the first wind energy array that floats on the sea’s surface rather than being dug into the ocean bed. In windswept northern Scotland, where abundant wind arrays both on land and off the coast vie for limited space, the distant location of the five towering 574ft-tall (174m) turbines, 15 miles (24km) offshore, is just one novelty of this renewable energy project. “On a clear day, from the harbour you can just make out the turbines of the Hywind park,” says Alastair Reid, an economic development official with Aberdeenshire Council. At Scotland’s easternmost headland, the old fishing port of Peterhead juts out into the North Sea. ![]()
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