The US Department of Energy has announced nine winners in the Phase One winners of the FLoating Offshore Wind ReadINess (FLOWIN) Prize.
The competition aims to tackle the floating offshore wind energy industry’s biggest supply chains challenges.
About two-thirds of the nation’s offshore wind resource potential is in areas with water depths over 60 metres, where floating offshore wind turbines are more practical and cost effective than fixed-bottom turbines.
The three-phase competition, which is open to floating wind platform designers, fabricators, and project site developers, aims to bridge manufacturing and logistics gaps to help reduce the cost of floating offshore wind by 70% and deploy 15GW by 2035.
Acting assistant secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alejandro Moreno said: “The winning teams all demonstrated designs that are realistic and represent progress toward wide-scale, domestic floating offshore wind energy manufacturing and deployment in the United States.
“They help lay the foundation for a thriving domestic offshore wind energy industry, which can provide clean, renewable energy to millions of American households, support good paying jobs, and revitalize port communities.”
Each Phase One winner will receive US$100,000 cash and US$75,000 in vouchers for technical support provided by DOE national laboratories.
In total, the FLOWIN Prize has a cash pool of US$5.85m, plus up to $1.175m in technical support.
The nine winners of Phase One include Aikido Technologies ‘s steel semi-submersible floating platform made of steel tubes that can be manufactured at tower facilities and Beridi USA’s concrete-based floating platform that uses damping pools and buoyancy chambers to provide superior stability, limiting fatigue loading.
FloatHOME’s triangular platform, WindFloat®, now in its fourth generation, provides deep-water stability through unique design features, including a damping system to absorb wave excitation movement, while OCG-Wind Full Cycle’slight-weight four-column semi-submersible floating platform design uses simple, slender components engineered for any wind turbine, making it customizable and ready for large-scale deployment.
PelaStar’s floating platform is a light-weight tension leg-platform design that minimizes environmental impacts while maintaining cost savings as well as manufacturing and installation flexibility and Technip Energies’ INO15 design is a semi-submersible, three-column floating platform.
The Tetra Triple-One floating platform uses a building-block arrangement, which involves fully producing the parts needed in an industrialised manufacturing environment and then transporting them to the assembly site, while the VolturnUS+ Domestically Produced Concrete Hull focuses on a simplified geometry for their concrete floating platform design.
Finally, incorporating tanks for buoyancy and balance, the ultra-stable WHEEL floating platform design can temporarily act as a barge platform, allowing it to be assembled with the wind turbine near shore and towed to sea.
Winners from Phase One are eligible to move into the second phase of the competition, in which each team will develop a pathway for mass manufacturing and deployment of its floating offshore wind energy substructure design.
Phase Two will have up to five winners, each receiving US$450,000 in cash and a technical services voucher valued at US$100,000.
The competing teams will be judged on their progress in developing a plan for mass manufacturing and deployment of gigawatt-scale, floating offshore wind energy farms.