The joint developers behind the Scottish floating wind project Salamander have signed an agreement with US outfit Ocergy to evaluate its platform technology.
Simply Blue Energy in partnership with Subsea 7 has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Ocergy to evaluate how its foundation technology can be deployed for the “stepping-stone” project.
Last month, Simply Blue Energy announced it had joined forces with Subsea 7 to form a joint venture to develop the Salamander floating offshore wind project off the north-east coast of Scotland.
The aim of the project is to provide a “stepping-stone” to bridge the gap between current demonstrator projects and the future commercial projects leased in the ScotWind process.
The project is intended to provide a “firm pipeline” for Scottish supply chain and to demonstrate the ability to achieve a “significant amount” of local content, in line with or beyond the Offshore Wind Sector deal ambitions, paving the way for securing additional local content within the later commercial scale developments.
From project inception, the foundation manufacturing and assembly was identified as a key element to secure higher local content.
The Salamander project has thus endeavoured to take a different approach to that of previous developments, leading to a focus on the supply chain within Scotland as the primary means of evaluating the direction of technology selection for project engineering.
This process has identified Ocergy’s OCG-Wind concept as having “significant potential” for commercial scale deployment within the capabilities of the current Scottish supply chain.
By supporting the development of new foundation technologies the Salamander project intends to provide a template for the successful construction of floating offshore wind projects within Scotland.
By working with Ocergy, the Salamander project expects to realise access to double the number of Scottish port facilities over some traditional floating concepts due to lower draft requirements, a scalable fabrication and assembly process, suitable for commercial scale deployment and a more than 30% decrease in fabricated steel mass, reducing the cost of energy whilst allowing the potential for local fabrication.
Ocergy has recently announced the completion of their Series A investment round from both Norwegian industrial group Moreld Ocean Wind (MOW) and Chevron Technology Ventures (CTV), the venture arm of the American oil and gas company.