WCS insights December 2023

Floating wind – Standardizing the floating turbine

Ole Heggheim, CEO, Wind Catching Systems

Standardization and scale are the two central pillars of cost reduction for floating wind, and for offshore wind in general. So far, the two have been at odds. Breaking that trend brings the benefit of being able to standardize the turbine, and accessing more of the mass-production benefits that is core to all successful volume industries.

I have described how the Windcatcher system is scaling with number of turbines rather than increasing the size of the turbine. This allows for the support structures to be standardized and unlocks true economics of scale to the operations and maintenance of floating wind. Scaling by changing the number of identical turbines, with no influence on turbine design, blade lengths or even the supply chain also means the components of the system itself can be standardized, bringing added benefit to the project economics.

The Windcatcher system uses many small, low-complexity turbines. The number of turbines in each system means that we have a naturally high redundancy in a harsh operation environment.

Moreover, standardizing turbines and other power system components across projects means that operators can have unprecedented confidence in the availability of spares and even replacement units.

A low complexity design approach also lowers the entry barrier to floating wind for supply chain companies currently not present in that market space. It also means that the turbines in the Windcatcher can be mass produced in any relevant market region by a number of suppliers.

Bringing scale and standardization together is key to our vision of unleashing the power of offshore wind.