Redundancy concepts as well as proactive spare parts strategies could help floating offshore wind developers to enhance chance of these types of projects being insurable.
Redundancy and spare parts concepts can help secure continued energy production in cases of mooring line failures, concluded World Forum Offshore (WFO) in its new white paper, Insurability of Floating Offshore Wind.
WFO’s Floating Offshore Wind Committee (FOWC) has been looking into the issue for the past year via its Insurance Subcommittee, which identified parameters that can make floating offshore wind insurable in the areas of floating turbine design and mooring line integrity.
For the acceleration of floating wind’s deployment, investment is a prerequisite.
“It is therefore necessary to gain trust of investors and financiers to enable the projects to move from a demonstrator to a commercial scale. Insurance is the security on which both Investors and Lenders rely when making their investment decision and which makes investments possible,” stated FOWC.
Its publication said “major differences have been identified in the risk perception of moorings, dynamic cables and repair and maintenance concepts”.
To achieve sufficient and long-term insurance coverage, the Insurance Subcommittee recommends that projects follow an approach that will mitigate the losses below the property damage and business interruption deductible.
This could be achieved either by (n-1) redundancy concepts or by a proactive spare parts strategy (in particular for cables and moorings) combined with sufficient defects liability provisions in the supply and installation contracts.
Turbines, including different floating platform concepts, have on the other hand not been perceived as a major obstacle to achieving an enhanced level of insurability, the white paper found.
It was, nevertheless, considered of high importance to have the turbine and floating platform design integrity independently reviewed and evaluated.