World’s first floating wind farm powers up offshore Scotland

The world's first floating wind farm recently started to deliver electricity off the coast of Peterhead, Scotland.

The Hywind project has five 6MW turbines floating 25 kilometers off the coast of Peterhead, near Aberdeen, Scotland. Built by the Norwegian oil company Statoil ASA and Masdar Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co., the project has a capacity of 30 megawatts and costed about 200 million pounds ($263 million) to construct. It will provide power to 20,000 homes.

The pioneering foundation technology involves a 78-metre-tall underwater ballast and three mooring lines that where attached to the seabed by means of suction caissons, to keep the turbines upright. The anchoring water depth exceeded 100 meters. A schematic illustration of the Hywind turbines foundation concept, adopted by The Guardian, is provided below.

A floating wind turbine is a large structure and combined with strong winds, waves and currents, the loads that have to be taken by the seabed soils are large. Moreover, the selected North Sea location for the Hywind poject has strong and steady winds that required reliable anchoring. The soil interpretation and the detailed geotechnical design of the suction anchors was performed by NGI.

Floating turbines are expected to open the industry up to new markets like Japan, the U.S. west coast and Mediterranean, where seabeds drop off steeply from the coast. According to Irene Rummelhoff, executive vice president of the New Energy Solutions business area at Statoil, "Hywind can be used for water depths up to 800 meters, thus opening up areas that so far have been inaccessible for offshore wind".