The offshore wind industry needs to quickly narrow down technological choices for floating foundations to enable industrialisation, according to DEME Offshore’s wind business unit manager Andy Reay.
Reay (pictured) told delegates at RUK’s virtual Global Offshore Wind conference today he expects to see “almost a picking of winners” in terms of “identifying floating foundation technologies that can be rapidly brought to the market at commercial scale.”
Speaking in a session and Q&A on new technologies post-COVID, he added: “My feeling is that we just have too many technological decisions to make in that area at the moment, and we need some way of narrowing down those technologies so we can industrialise the whole supply chain for offshore floating wind.”
He said he thought floating deployment would happen faster than he had previously thought.
“It’s an area I expect to see a huge amount of focus now – there are large markets globally that need floating technology to be able to access,” he said.
Reay also suggested changes in the market might see a more stratified tier two, with different contractors focusing on different scopes of work.
He added that there was potential for green hydrogen and storage technologies to be brought into developers’ business cases.
GE Renewables engineering and product development general manager Vincent Schellings said there were a number of areas where innovation would continue to bring costs down, including duplication of electrical balance of plant offshore and onshore as with transformers and switchgear.
Vertical partners need to collaborate more and a pipeline is needed “that extends well beyond five years” to accelerate innovation, he added, while support to universities to develop long term talent and solutions were also vital.