"Considering both sides, economic and technical, innovation of the new platform will have a global focus. The foreseen significant cost reduction will break the market and mark a new way of carrying out the installation of wind generation equipment. The final demonstration in an operational environment of the new offshore platform and its introduction to the market will arrive at the right time when traditional seabed fixed platforms are reaching its technical and economical limits (for >50m depth).
Depending on the offshore wind farm characteristics, the cost per installed MW ranges from 2.5 million EUR up to 4 million EUR. per MW. Wind farms closer to the coast, at lower depths using simple monopole foundations are in the lower end of the range while the ones far from the coast at larger depths using jacket foundations tend to need larger investments per MW.
Wind farm developers are pressed to offer reduced energy prices to win the tenders. This pressure in costs is moved down to the value chain affecting not only WTG manufacturers and their suppliers (rotor, nacelle, chains, tower, etc.) and but also balance of plant suppliers (foundation, substation, export cables, etc.).
As an indication of the required investment for a pilot offshore floating wind farm, the Hywind Scotland project will face and investment of 7.13 million EUR per MW installed. This number indicates that a lot of work is needed to reduce Floating Offshore Wind costs up to a commercial level.
As explained before, the new FLOW platform design is focused on reducing the LCOE that will directly imply savings in all the stages related to manufacturing, loading-out, WTG assembling, and installation.
FLOW expects to have a reduction of 30% of costs compared to other solutions (HyWind and WindFloat) a 40% of savings in load-out and transportation costs and 35% less average days to assembly the foundation and the tower in the platform.
The total average savings will make the FLOW platform the best value for money option in the market."
