According to WindEurope report, offshore wind is expected to produce 7% to 11% of the EU’s electricity demand by 2030 and the energy produced from wind turbines in deep waters could meet the EU’s electricity consumption four times. With Floating Offshore Wind (FOW) solutions, wind power can expand into new deep-water areas, often further from shore, opening vast new areas and markets currently unavailable for offshore wind.
The main objective of FLOTANT project is to develop the conceptual and basic engineering, including performance tests of the mooring and anchoring systems and the dynamic cable to improve cost-efficiency, increased flexibility and robustness to a hybrid concrete-plastic floating structure implemented for Deep Water Wind Farms. Innovative solutions will be designed to be deployed in water depths (100-600 m), optimizing the LcOE of the floating solution (90 €/MWh) by 2030. Prototypes testing of this offshore wind floating platform and its associated mooring, anchoring and dynamic cable systems are foreseen in relevant environment and real sea conditions within the scope of the project. Moreover, the assessment and optimisation of the construction, installation and decommissioning techniques will also contribute to bring down the current cost of offshore wind energy, as well as, increasing its deployment. An expected 60% reduction in CAPEX and 55% in the OPEX by 2030, will be directly motivated by FLOTANT novel developments and additional reductions due to external technology improvements. In addition, environmental, social, and socio-economic impacts will be assessed, increasing social acceptance of FOW in deep waters.
This principal objective of FLOTANT project will be achieved by through the development of the following specific objectives and associated Work Packages:
The FLOTANT technology developed is a barge foundation to support offshore wind turbines optimised for deep water areas. It is made of concrete, steel and XPS foam blocks which provide buoyancy. .
A cutting edge mooring cable was developed led to multistrand composite mooring demonstrators of 20 and 100 TN of strength with antifouling and anti-bite properties, manufactured with a novel method and integrated load monitoring with Fibre Optic sensors to measure temperature and strain. As part of the mooring system, mooring polymer springs were also developed, these can deliver significant reductions in load and fatigue for the whole mooring system.
Related to the power evacuation system, The cable aluminium core is of semi-wet design subject to influence of water ageing but eliminating the radial water penetration metal barrier over the power core, which is also subject to fatigue. The conventional double steel wire armour was replaced by an innovative Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) braid with integrated Fibre Optic (FO) units to monitor the behaviour (strain & temperature) of the cable during fatigue testing.
The innovations introduced within the FLOTANT project were evaluated in terms of their economic impact comparing with alternative source of generation. The cost model developed aims to evaluate the expected LCoE, CapEx, Opex, and Annual Energy Production (AEP) for 60 MW pilot park and 600 MW commercial wind farm deployments in both study locations, Gran Canaria and West of Barra.
The goal of this study is to assess if the targets formulated at the proposal stage of achieving 60% reduction in LCoE through a 60% reduction in CapEx and a 55% reduction in OpEx. Comparing these key techno-economic indicators with the estimated values for a 600MW deployment by 2030 of the FLOTANT technology shows that these targets have been met, both when comparing with the generic state-of-the-art defined by Carbon Trust, but also when comparing with pre-commercial deployments such as Hywind Scotland. Based on this assessment the FLOTANT system could achieve an LCoE of 73-93 €/MWh by 2030.
