Global renewable energy giant Iberdrola is in advanced-stage planning of a strategy to expand its current 10GW offshore wind development pipeline with as much as 2GW of floating plant by 2030.

The head of offshore wind at the Spanish utility, which last week announced it would invest in lead-off floating projects off Europe with the wider ambition of taking an “active interest” in plays off the US and Asia, told Recharge it was entering the fast-emerging sector thinking “gigawatts and billions [of dollars] not megawatts and millions [of dollars]”.

“By 2030, we have the ambition to have one or two large-scale [floating wind] projects deployed, so 1-2GW. I think that is a realistic target to set. Because there is still a lot of work to get the cost down on floating technology and develop far-from shore sites,” Iberdrola's global offshore wind business managing director Jonathan Cole.

“Beyond that we don’t to confine ourselves with numbers – we will take the opportunities whether bottom fixed or floating, wherever they come up, whatever market we are playing in. But what we do believe is that floating wind is going be very big indeed.

“[The Iberdrola group] is planning to invest this year somewhere in the region of €10bn ($11bn) in clean-energy infrastructure,” said Cole. “And [as an offshore wind leader], going forward we will be looking to bring forward as many fixed-foundation projects offshore as we can in the shortest possible time-scale, and that then will naturally mean that floating wind projects will be brought forward as well.”

Leading off this ambitious development programme will be the Flagship pilot – an EU-funded project off Norway that will test a 10MW-plus turbine atop a next-generation concrete semisubmersible design called the OO-Star Wind Floater developed by engineering outfit Dr Techn Olav Olsen – with developer EDF, consultancy DNV-GL and contractor Kvaerner.

But the demonstrator being built at the MetCentre test facility in the North Sea, where Stiesdal Offshore Technologies’ innovative TetraSpar concept will be trialed , is one of several – including an as-yet unnamed project now being firmed up for installation either off the Canaries Islands or Spain’s Basque Country – that are part of “technology agnostic” strategy aimed at “understanding the big picture things that are going to help develop floating wind at utility-scale”, said Cole.

“We are kicking off a number of demonstration projects covering two or three of the different technology types,” he said. “These are not really about the technological platform structures, more about the performance of the turbines and the control and monitoring systems and installation techniques.”

“We want to test the ‘whole concept’ out and then be in a position to make decisions on what to use on big-scale projects about the value chain, about the project economics, and about technology preferences.”

Installing units on sites as environmentally dissimilar as the Norwegian North Sea and Spanish Atlantic, Cole added, feeds into Iberdrola’s belief in getting “the fullest range experience” from the demonstrators.

“Different environmental conditions, different sea-states, different wind flow – when you are trialing technologies you really want to test them under as many different environmental conditions as you can to get the most learning out these demonstrators.”

Iberdrola is also “actively interested in processes for large scale floating offshore wind projects in locations such as the Scotland and the US – different creatures but both attractive plays”, noted Cole, adding “and others in addition to these, in the longer term”.

The energy market fundamentals driven by Britain’s 2050 net-zero carbon ambitions, he said, mean floating wind plant off Scotland will be “key” to achieving the goal of building 75GW of offshore wind, as outlined by UK government advisory body the Committee on Climate Change.

“This [target] is not going to be feasible if we only build fixed-foundation wind, so floating is going to become an increasingly relevant part of the energy mix in the UK in that net-zero journey. And Scotland’s wind resource has the potential to be a big part of this, so it is important we get the technology matured and ready for market in order, later in this decade, to start deploying large-scale projects.

The US floating wind market, he underlined, will be “state-driven, like much of the current renewables build-out but mainly because there are states [on the West Coast] with water depths too deep for conventional bottom-fixed”.

A study last year from consultancy Energy + Environmental Economics looking at the largest near-terms floating wind market in the US, California, calculated floating wind power could save state tax-payers $2bn on their electricity rates by 2040 if a 7-9GW fleet off its coast as it transitions away from fossil-based generation in the coming decade.

“California, to start, is having to turn to floating wind from the get-go and might be a real boost because here you have a state that wants to build offshore wind but can’t [because of water depths] – and this and other [state] markets are pretty big-scale.”

Asia – where floating wind’s market profile has been brought in to sharp relief of late by China Longyuan Power Group – the world’s largest turbine operator – unveiling its first foray into floating wind recently, and giant offshore construction yard CIMC Raffles inking a with French floating wind technology outfit Dolfines to develop projects off Europe and Asia – is on Iberdrola’s radar but still on the “far horizon”, said Cole.

“The position we have taken until now at Iberdrola is that we are very strong in certain markets – Southern Europe, Germany, France, the UK and the Americas – and so we have been focusing on growing opportunities there.

“But, of course, a business that is looking to grow and maintain a market-leading position means that we will be looking at opportunities in China and Asia more widely,” said Cole.

“We are not a company that enters a new market for a few hundred megawatts and million-dollar investments – we go for gigawatts and billions [of dollars]. When we see the right scale of opportunity in Asia, we will go and take it.”

Iberdrola was an early mover in the floating wind space last decade via a project called TLPWind that had been developing a tension leg platform concept, and though Cole stressed that the company’s concentration is on “project development and operation not technology provision”, he said “as owner of the intellectual property on this technology … we might in future use it – or collaborate with a company which would like to help us develop it further”.

The launch of Iberdrola into floating wind adds to a lengthening roll-call of major energy players taking positions in sector, with the Spanish group joining fellow European power utility RWE and oil giants Total and Shell, all of which have made beacon investments in the technology in recent months.

Industry analysts range widely in their 2030 global forecasts for floating wind, with estimates spread from as little as 6GW up to almost 19GW – with arrays in development in all major maritime regions and over 20GW of commercial-scale projects in early planning – and the build-out all influenced by how quickly levellised cost of energy numbers can be brought down to €40-60/MWh, to be competitive with conventional offshore wind.

Wind

Floating wind power will be 'gigawatts and billions of dollars' play for Iberdrola