Eight technologies that are being developed to help commercialise the floating wind sector have been selected as winners of a technology acceleration competition, funded by the Scottish government and run by the Carbon Trust’s Floating Wind Joint Industry Project (JIP), and share £1m of Scottish government funding.
The competition was designed to address four key industry challenge area that need to be overcome to commercialise floating wind. The four areas were identified in Phase 1 of the Floating Wind JIP: monitoring and inspection, mooring systems, heavy lift maintenance and ‘tow to port’ maintenance.
The successful applicants are from a variety of sectors including oil & gas, IT & telecommunications, and engineering. The innovations range in maturity, therefore the funding will be used to support different activities from desktop studies to offshore demonstration.
The winning companies and technologies were: Fugro, AS Mosley and University of Strathclyde (monitoring and inspection), Technology from Ideas and WFS Technologies (monitoring and inspection), Dublin Offshore (mooring systems), Intelligent Mooring Systems and University of Exeter (mooring systems), RCAM Technologies and the Floating Wind Technology Company (mooring systems),Vryhof (mooring systems), Conbit (heavy lift maintenance), and Aker Solutions (‘tow to port’ maintenance).
According to the Carbon Trust, floating offshore wind is an emerging renewables sector, with significance for places like Scotland where water depths often do not allow for the use of fixed bottom turbines, and that floating wind is forecast to scale up to 12GW of capacity globally by 2030, becoming a market estimated to be worth £32bn.
