A floating wind turbine is an offshore wind turbine that sits on some floating structure in areas where it wouldn’t be feasible to generate electricity with bottom mounted turbines. They are a new and developing form of technology even though they were first mentioned in the 1970′s. It wasn’t until the wind energy industry matured and demand grew that companies started researching in earnest various methods of feasibility. The wind farms or individual structures are placed out in water around 20km off shore, which prevents issues from ship traffic or fishing and complaints about seeing the structures from the coastline.
Floating Wind Farm History
The first floating wind park and turbine was produced by Blue H Technologies in the Netherlands in 2008. It was transported to Southeast Italy to waters 113m deep and 21km from the shoreline. It generated 80kW. After the success of this project Blue H began construction of a 2.4 MW project in Brindisi, Italy which will be a part of a potential floating wind farm called Tricase, which could generate 90MW off the Italian coast.
Another recent project was by Hywind, which installed a 2.3 MW floating wind turbine in the North Sea, off Norway in September 2009. The wind turbine cost $62 million to build and position and is still generating power today. It’s expect to produce 9 GWh of electricity each year. The turbine has already survived a year in rough seas, including 11 meter waves with little ware and tare.
By building these structures in deeper water, they become more economically viable due to the fact that wind flows are more consistent, strong and reliable in the deeper waters. Feasibility studies are now showing that due to increasing energy prices of non renewable resources off shore and shallow shore wind farms maybe be soon make economical sense to build.
Floating Wind Turbine Concepts
In the last 3 years a number of new concepts have been put forward to increase the efficiency of offshore turbines. Most of these have been pushed by the European community. A French company called Ideol has developed a method of floating wind turbines so that they will turn with the wind and be allowed to be controlled manually from a computer onshore. The cost for their concept is one million euros/ MW. Prototypes will be built in 2013.
In Portugal a company called WindFloat is developing a way to reduce motion and increase stability with a new type of platform. Their project costs 30 million dollars and has already begun.
There are some ideas for floating wind farms in North America but due to regulations and American economic weakness, this projects have been stalled indefinitely.