Engineering news
Industry and academia are to work together to improve the design of wind turbine foundations.
Dong Energy and an academic consortium led by the University of Oxford will investigate how new monopile materials and installation methods could reduce the cost of offshore wind power by 35-40% by 2020.
A monopile foundation for a typical offshore wind turbine weighs approximately 600 tonnes and primarily consists of steel. For a wind farm of 100 or more turbines this represents a substantial fabrication and installation cost.
The thickness of the steel used for each pile is about 100mm. If this can be reduced, even by a fraction, without compromising the load-carrying capacity and stiffness of the foundation, there will be significant savings made in developing offshore wind.
Bent Christensen, senior vice president of Dong Energy Wind Power, said: “The cost of energy from offshore wind turbines must be reduced.
“We expect to find significant savings by trimming monopile sizes and finding new ways of installing the foundations, amongst others. Consequently, we believe a significant contribution can come from this area towards our efforts of reducing the price of offshore wind power by 35-40% by 2020.”
The research project, PISA (Pile Soil Analysis), is being run under the framework of the Carbon Trust Offshore Wind Accelerator, a UK government supported organisation established to promote offshore wind energy and reduce the cost of energy. In addition to Dong Energy, industrial input will come from RWE, Statoil, Statkraft, SSE, Scottish Power and Vattenfall.
Academic partners will include the University of Oxford, Imperial College London and University College Dublin.
The research project will run for 18 months and aims to develop monopile designs to be used in Round 3 offshore wind projects in the UK.