Engineering news
Norwegian energy company Statoil has been granted a lease from the Crown Estate for the use of the seabed of the east cost of Scotland and can begin construction of its 30MW floating wind farm.
The Hywind project - set to be the world’s largest floating wind farm - consists of five 6MW turbines. The turbines will be deployed on floating steel tubes filled with ballast fastened to the seabed at Buchan Deep, 25km offshore from Peterhead, in water depths of 95-120 metres - deeper than any previous offshore wind turbines installed around the coast of the UK.
The pilot park will cover around 4 square kilometres and provide power to an estimated 20,000 houses. The average wind speed in this area of the North Sea is around 10 metres per second.
Statoil's proprietary Hywind-specific pitch motion controller is integrated with the turbine’s control system to minimise excessive motions of the structure. This also eliminates the loss of energy due to aerodynamic or hydrodynamic movements and maximises the power output from the turbine.
The mooring system consists of three mooring lines attached to anchors suited to the seabed conditions on site.
The floating turbine technology was first conceptualised in 2001, a scale-model was used to test the concept in 2005 and the world’s first floating full-scale wind turbine Hywind Demo was installed in Norway in 2009.
Leif Delp, project director for Hywind, said: “Our objective with the Hywind pilot park is to demonstrate the feasibility of future commercial, utility-scale floating wind farms. This will further increase the global market potential for offshore wind energy, contributing to realising our ambition of profitable growth in renewable energy and other low-carbon solutions.”
The project secured consent from Marine Scotland last October and Statoil has taken the final investment decision to construct the project. Preliminary on-shore and near-shore works will commence later this year and deployment of the turbines is due to begin in 2017, with first power being generated towards the end of the year.
The onshore operation and maintenance base will be located in Peterhead, also drawing on resources from Statoil’s existing office in Aberdeen.