Today, the sector is on the cusp of a great leap forward into industrial reality, with the 3.4GW foreseen to be switched on by 2030 pointing the way towards eventually harnessing hundreds of gigawatts of energy with floaters anchored around the world.

Despite this promise, progress so far has been hard-won. The utility-scale prototypes installed to date — Hywind 1 off Norway, WindFloat 1 off Portugal and a trio of multi-megawatt machines off Japan — are a drop in the ocean compared to the seven terawatts of global potential gusting over water depths of 50 metres or more.

But