Floating wind must avoid “the mistakes of fixed-foundation offshore” by not confining itself to early growth on just one continent and leaving the rest of the world to play catch-up.
That message, from World Forum Offshore Wind official and sector pioneer Bruno Geschier, was among the key themes to emerge from a high-level Recharge digital roundtable delving into the prospects for floating in Asia-Pacific – a replay of which is available here.
A panel of industry big hitters ran the rule over the prospects for the key regional contenders in the market, with strong support for the argument that with its shipyards, industrial giants and energy engineering heritage, South Korea has what it takes to be a floating leader – despite its slow early progress in offshore wind.
However, like other key Asia Pacific markets such as Taiwan, Japan and Vietnam, seizing that opportunity will need a closer alignment of “political will” and the realities facing developers on the ground, the roundtable heard.
One market that will certainly be a major force in floating wind – as throughout the renewables sector – is China. The head of wind OEM Ming Yang’s European arm, Wei Chen, gave the Recharge event an exclusive insight into early progress in Chinese seas, and explained why floating turbines could help the country meet its wider offshore wind ambitions by building moored projects in shallow waters.
The wider offshore wind prospects in Asia – and specifically Japan – were highlighted by JERA president Satoshi Onoda in an exclusive interview with Recharge.
The appeal of the play off Japan was underlined further when global leader Orsted sealed its second alliance there to bid in the first large-scale auction round.
A “massive and immediate” renewable energy push and no more new fossil projects: that uncompromising recipe for decarbonisation and climate salvation came not from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, but from the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global body whose own roots reach back to its founding during the oil crisis in the 1970s.
The IEA's numbers are vast. The agency wants annual solar additions to hit 630GW by 2030 with wind adding 390GW a year, a figure four times the level achieved under 2020’s record deployment, if the world is to stay on track for 2050 net zero.
The levels of hydrogen needed are equally mind-boggling – about 306 million tonnes of green H2 derived from renewable energy each year, not to mention almost 200 million tonnes of the blue variety.
On both the renewables and hydrogen front, ambitious plans unveiled by Oman this week were very much in tune with the IEA’s thinking. The Middle East state wants to host 25GW of renewables powering “millions of tonnes of zero-carbon green hydrogen” in one of the most ambitious such schemes seen globally to date.
Blade recycling is very much the weak link in the green credentials of the wind industry, as pictures of piles of them disposed as landfill uncomfortably remind the sector at regular intervals.
Global OEM giant Vestas and its partners in an industry-academic consortium hope to change that with a technology claimed to allow epoxy resin used in composite blades to be taken back to a near-virgin state and reused in new components.
The Vestas executive leading the project told Recharge the ultimate proof of its success will be to see blades using the technology on the turbines of its rivals – but cautioned that it will be at least six years before that happens while the application is tested and proved.
