Odfjell Oceanwind, together with automation and manufacturing company Prodtex, have established a joint venture to produce floating wind turbine foundations.
The joint venture, Windsteel Technologies, will establish the production capacity necessary to meet the need for hundreds of floating wind foundations per year in Europe alone.
The aim is to have the first factory operational by 2027 in time for supplying the first Deepsea Star floating wind foundations to the GoliatVIND demonstration project in Norway.
Geir Bjorkeli, former CEO of Corvus Energy, has been appointed to head up the joint venture.
Windsteel Technologies will act as a hub for delivering the foundations to the market and work in close collaboration with specialist companies from the local and international supply chain.
The first partners are already in place and more will be added in the coming months and years, preparing for what is expected to be a multibillion-euro market at the end of this decade.
The joint venture is a result of several years of collaboration between Odfjell Oceanwind and Prodtex, where the two companies have jointly developed automated production and assembly methods for Odfjell Oceanwind’s Deepsea floating wind foundations.
“Production of floating wind foundations of the size and scale needed to develop gigawatt floating wind parks will require factories, and not yards like we are used to see from the oil and gas and ship building industries.
“These factories will be highly specialised with production and assembly lines that are customised to produce foundation designs with relatively similar structural components.
“Very much like we see in car or aeroplane factories”, Per Lund, CEO of Odfjell Oceanwind and chairman of Windsteel Technologies said.
He added: “If floating offshore wind shall become a relevant source of energy in the future, we need to dramatically reduce the costs, but also increase the scale.
“And we need to do this without sacrificing quality.
“These offshore structures for wind turbines of 15MW and larger shall be able to withstand extreme loads for more than 30 years without having to be towed back for repairs.
“Failures based on poor quality welds or surface treatment are simply not acceptable.”