The cost of anchoring floating wind arrays at sea could be slashed in half leading to “tremendous” capital savings in the construction of the sector’s first utility-scale projects, if synthetic moorings lines are used in place of conventional steel chains, results from tests at the pioneering EU FloatGen pilot in the French Atlantic have shown.
A high-tensile woven-nylon design devised for the 2MW prototype, which is based on the innovative ‘damping pool’ platform from technology developer Ideol, is calculated to be able to cut the cost of a mooring spread by up to 40% and the price of installation by a further 20% – potentially a huge stride forward for a sector striving to drive down its levellised cost of energy (LCOE) as it enters industrialisation,
“This will result in tremendous savings – in the many tens of millions of dollars for each [of the coming 500MW-1GW floating wind farms] now being developed around the world,” Ideol chief sales and...
