“For a long time, I was not entirely positive about the idea of floating [wind turbine] solutions. All our discussions with other designers and developers made me think it was far too expensive, needing 3,000-4,000 tonnes of steel to build them so that they would be stable and so on,” he states.
“But when we were in Japan earlier this year, we got into it somewhat deeper because of the scale of the plans there in offshore wind [which, because of the country’s narrow continental shelf, would require vast arrays of floating turbines] and the prohibitive cost — around €8,000 [$10,350] per kW.
“We
