World’s first floating wind farm arrives

The world’s first floating wind farm, Hywind Scotland, started to deliver electricity to the Scottish grid in October. Supported by both the UK and Scottish governments, the 30 MW wind farm, operated by Statoil in partnership with Masdar, is located 25 km offshore Peterhead in Aberdeenshire. The wind farm comprises five 6 MW turbines from Siemens in around 100 m of water. The onshore operations and maintenance base for the wind farm is located in Peterhead, while the operations center is in Great Yarmouth. Statoil and Masdar also intend to install Batwind, a 1 MWh lithium battery storage for offshore wind energy, to be linked to Hywind Scotland.

Battery storage has the potential to mitigate intermittency and optimise output. The Hywind technology can be used for water depths up to 800 m, thus opening up areas that so far have been inaccessible for offshore wind, according to Irene Rummelhoff, Executive Vice President of the New Energy Solutions business area in Statoil. Floating wind technology is expected to follow a downward cost trajectory over the next decade, says the company. ‘Statoil has an ambition to reduce the costs of energy from the Hywind floating wind farm to €40–60/MWh by 2030.

Knowing that up to 80% of the offshore wind resources are in deep waters (+60 m) where traditional bottom fixed installations are not suitable, floating offshore wind is expected to play a significant role in the growth of offshore wind going forward,’ adds Rummelhoff.