Commissioning of the 25MW WindFloat Atlantic (WFA) floating wind project off Portugal earlier this year was a watershed for the rapidly emerging sector, with the array — continental Europe’s first multi-unit development — pointing the way towards the hundreds of megawatts expected to be turning in European waters by the end of the decade that will spearhead up to 70GW worldwide by 2040.

Switch-on also carried a paramount significance for the company that supplied the platforms for the 25MW development, Principle Power. The US firm prototyped the WindFloat concept in 2011 not far from the location of WFA and now, almost ten years later, is sitting on the biggest project pipeline among the sector’s technology trio of pace-setters, Norwegian energy giant Equinor and ambitious French start-up Ideol.

Principle Power has featured prominently in the wave of industrial-scale floating wind developments that have rolled through this year, including being tapped for the near-100MW Erebus array off Wales that marks international oil giant Total’s entry into the market and the same-size Emerald project off Ireland being progressed by local outfit Simply Blue Energy.

The WindFloat platform is now signed up for use on multiple projects around the world, including the high-profile 50MW Kincardine off the UK — on track to be the world’s largest floating wind farm once online in 2021, the 30MW Golfe de Lion off France, and the 150MW Redwood Coast Offshore Wind Project off the US West Coast. Principle Power also recently secured a major investment from Tokyo Gas to kick-start “hundreds of megawatts-plus projects off Japan” and the first 500MW phase of KFWind complex off South Korea.

Aaron Smith, Principle Power’s recently appointed chief commercial officer (CCO), sees WFA as embodying the industry in spirit and letter as it expands into markets around the world, and as such as a “springboard” for the company and the sector.

“Demonstrating this project has so many implications. A tremendous accomplishment – and learning experience – especially for the Portuguese and Spanish supply chains that supplied the WindFloats.It has been equally tremendous as a collaboration between the WindPlus development consortium, MHI Vestas [which supplied the turbines], and the other contractors in delivering it,” Smith told Recharge in an exclusive interview as he took up the CCO role.

There is so much experience we will able to mine for the next generation of technologies

“We are excited to use WFA as a springboard to show floating wind can be built and operated economically globally … and to allow us to refine our procedures and processes for the much bigger projects ahead – off Europe but also in other regions.

“The lessons learned through the execution of small commercial projects like WFA are extremely important because many of these learnings are hard to predict until performing the operation, and it is recognised that any inefficiencies in commercial scale projects could be compounded and have a much more serious impact.

“There is so much experience we will able to mine for the next generation of technologies.”

New technologies

The international floating wind world has evolved at speed in the last ten years, with Principle Power, Equinor and Ideol soon to be challenged on cost by a number of new-age designs, including those of Stiesdal Offshore Technologies, Saitec, UMaine, X1Wind and EnerOcean, all of which are engineering concepts that break away from the offshore oil-derived first-generation designs.

Smith sees WindFloat – a slimline three-column steel semisubmersible – as on a trajectory to be competitive with any design in development, having slashed its levelised cost of energy (LCOE) by 60% between the 2MW prototype and three-unit WFA array and expecting further “positive scaling” to shave down LCOE further for the commercial-scale developments on the horizon.

The 100-300MW “bridge” arrays on developers’ drawing boards now, he notes, should be deliverable at €80-100/MWh ($95-$120/MWh), and the 500MW-plus projects — the backbone of the almost 4GW of schemes where Principle Power has “technology exclusivity” and the 28GW it is “tracking” — as “well within the industry [2030] target of €40-60/MWh”.

“We are seeing the industry is very much on track to reaching those targets [forecast by Carbon Trust],” states Smith. “And what is really compelling is the customer-developers that have received the blessing of their boards to pursue floating wind opportunities dedicating real resources, and establishing cross-functional teams, to deploy the best, suitable technologies.

“The next big challenge and opportunity for the industry is deploying at scale and achieving the associated economies of scale,” he continues. “Major cost out opportunities exist in supporting the deployment of bigger turbines and the ‘positive scaling’ of our WindFloat platform and simply having huge numbers of these units working together in sync offshore.”

Scottish opportunity

Scotland’s long-awaited ScotWind offshore wind leasing round — which could open the door to 10GW in new projects and an accompanying €10bn surge of investment in the sector — will be key to further tightening the cost screws.

“In the upcoming ScotWind leasing round we expect there to be real numbers of capital-committed developers – in the BOEM [Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] call for nominations in California [in 2019], we saw 14 developers indicating interest in obtaining a commercial lease in the designated areas. I think we are going to see more than that for floating wind projects off Scotland,” says Smith.

“To my mind, the sub-100MW developments we see advancing in the UK , [such as the Erebus project backed by Total and Simply Blue Energy that just received and agreement for lease in from The Crown Estate], are going to come online years in advance before the ScotWind projects , providing an important bridge. There are smaller projects that might be carved out of bigger ScotWind areas and brought to market in some of the expected floating-specific CfD [contracts for difference] auctions.

“But there is no doubt of the importance to the sector of the ScotWind round because so much of what we see revolves around the question of how to get to the point where you are delivering true industrial-scale floating wind projects.

“And the first piece of that is having exclusive rights to an offshore area with sufficient scale, and that is consistent with the expected outcomes of ScotWind, where the government is targeting award of up to 10GW, mostly in deep water,” he adds, noting too the ramp up of investment “being done in the supply chain companies, in the skills, so that [Scottish] companies can step when [ScotWind projects] get underway in earnest”.

Calculus by industry bodies RenewableUK & Scottish Renewables last year suggested floating wind power could be built into a market worth tens of billions of pounds by mid-century in the UK if the British government adapts its Contracts for Difference auction system to support the sector – and would at the same time accelerate the UK toward its zero carbon emissions pledge.

As with the wider offshore wind industry, Asia is foreseen soon eclipsing Europe’s floating wind build-out, powered ahead by supply chain-building megaprojects off Japan, Korea and China, while the US, starting with development off California on the eastern edge of the Pacific Rim, is also forecast to grow into an international-scale play.

“The inclination in Asia is for now quite nationalistic, but we feel it will evolve in a more region-wide way in the future, because there are extremely ambitious plans and targets for floating wind in several Asian nations. There are different industrial competencies among the different jurisdictions, and geographically there is close proximity among these countries,” says Smith.

US prospects

“So in some way what might come about could be somewhat similar to Europe [for conventional offshore wind] where you have national plans that aim to foster local content and jobs and then you have the reality of economics and constraints that will encourage both companies to look at things from the regional perspective.”

The long-touted potential for floating wind off the US West Coast – including the REAC project Principle Power is involved in off California – remains befogged due to the backward-slipping plans by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to hold a first commercial lease auction there, originally set for 2020, despite a coalition of offshore wind heavyweights including Orsted, Equinor and Northland Power calling for at least 10GW of projects to be developed in the next two decades to boost state plans to reach 100% renewable energy by 2045.

Prospects for floating projects off East Coast “certainly could” come good sooner than in the US Pacific, Smith believes, with a nod to a BOEM white paper on the wind resource potential and the economics-honing leverage that could be had from the construction and power transmission infrastructure being built for the first wave of industrial-scale bottom-fixed offshore wind off the eastern seaboard.

“There are a number of companies looking at development opportunities for floating wind off the East coast but ultimately this will be a process driven by BOEM and so we will have to wait and see,” he says.

“Having half floating and half fixed [offshore turbines for a project], for instance, and by virtue of both technologies being there a developer could double the annual installed capacity and so achieve economies of scale that make both sectors more attractive to investors.”

The World Bank in a recent report suggested floating wind power could swiftly take up a leading role in the energy production portfolios of many national markets, spotlighting Brazil, India, Morocco, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Vietnam as having the technical resource potential to spur the addition of over 2TW to the global fleet in the coming decades.

“Floating wind is a complement to bottom-fixed,” Smith underlines. “And the offshore wind piece is getting bigger by the day. We are taking so much experience and technology from the bottom-fixed sector – and they will increasingly take more from the methods and strategies we are developing in the floating wind as we become a bigger part of an overall industry that is thinking in terms of gigawatt clusters and so on.”

Many still discount floating wind for its high ticket price – four demonstrators being built off France are being underwritten at €240/MWh – but Smith places a historical frame around the sector’s ability to continue to drive down costs as it sails into the mainstream global energy mix.

“If we look back at the projections for the onshore wind industry back in the early-2000s – where the forecasts were for 150-160GW to be installed by 2020 and we have since quadrupled that – my sense is that once mature policies are implemented in governmental regulatory frameworks that allow floating wind projects to progress and developers to get site control, we are going to see the market vastly exceed current projections.

Wider confidence

“And that may include the Carbon Trust’s latest projections because the potential for floating wind to contribute enormously – and affordably – to global carbon reduction goals is almost limitless.”

The sea-change for Smith, who has been with Principle Power for the past five years and before than worked for the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, can be seen in the “general confidence” of oil companies and utilities in the role the global floating wind build-out will play in their corporate strategy shift away from fossil fuels.

“There is a general confidence that the technologies will be there for their development timelines and so there is a sense of ‘let’s build up the pipeline’ and take these projects forward. For Principle Power this is an industrial transition moment.

“What we see with [oil companies and utilities] announcing net zero targets and how they are going to deploy their capital to get there, [is that] they are looking at doing offshore wind and floating wind in gigawatt, multi-billion-euro chunks,” he continues.

With onshore wind or solar power, which already each have over 600GW operating worldwide, “you have to do 30-40 projects to reach this sort of capacity and contribution to net zero”, but with the lower transaction costs found in floating wind “are hugely advantageous to the projects being moved forward by companies that need to make really big investments”, Smith states.

“I see that Principle Power is entering into a new phase in its development as company – like the industry more widely – that has the promise of a tremendous potential rate of growth. My hope is that we can find a way to work to make floating wind projects happen in every major maritime region in the world as quickly and competitively as possible and become the massive source of mainstream renewable energy it can be.”

“Floating wind is now bankable technology,” he concludes. “There has been a change in mindset in the investment houses, at developers, within governments in past few years that has led to their increasingly seeing floating wind as being able to provide sustainable, profitable, gigawatt-scale clean energy projects, to accelerate the energy transition.”

Wind

'We will see the floating wind market vastly exceed the projections available today'