Is floating wind's quest for perfection holding it back?

A continuous conveyer belt of new platform designs may be doing more harm than good for floating wind, said a panel at RenewableUK’s Global Offshore Wind event, as its members debated if standardisation will come through painless alignment or a “tooth and claw” fight between OEMs.

“You can’t have scale if you’re still building 50 different designs” for floating wind turbines, Ioannis Papadopoulos, business manager at DNV, told an audience at RenewableUK’s Global Offshore Wind summit in Manchester on Wednesday.

The sector needs to move away from “continuous first of a kind” and “lower level demonstrator” projects, he said, which slow down the de-risking process and the building up of the supply chain.

There is a need for “industry standards” for floating wind, he said, or “guidelines at the very least.”

Papadopoulos acknowledged that there is however a “balancing act” with innovation. “You don’t want to standardise so early that we then drown out innovation and find ourselves behind the learning curve.”

Dorthe Kirkeby of offshore engineering contractor Aker Solutions said that “cooperation in the market” could help the standardisation effort.

It is also important that “experience from the operational phases” is incorporated into designs to see “what works over a lifetime,” she said.

Andrew Stormonth-Darling of the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult said there is a need to “keep the door open to innovation” but suggested there could be a “design envelope we can work towards.”

Chris Willow, head of floating development at RWE, argued it will be “good old fashioned competition red in tooth and claw” that will slim down the market and the designs out there.

“I think that we need to move on from this idea that we will be able to identify the 'best structure, the winning structure,'” he said.

What will be more important is the “best delivery models,” a combination of “concept, contractor, supply chain.”

That may mean that the “best design is not going to be the one that wins.”

You can have a “perfectly optimised design,” he said. “But if you don’t have the supply chain and you don’t have the delivery partners, we can’t choose it.”

“It’s not going to be a nice pleasant alignment,” he said. “There’s going to be attrition… people won’t make it.”

One issue that could make standardising floating wind harder than fixed bottom is that whereas there were generic monopiles and jackets, there is no generic floating wind foundation.

Willow questioned whether the IP held by floating wind platform makers will accelerate things or “gum up the system by stopping the melding of innovation.”

“When will we get past IP? When will we start to move to more generic foundations.”

Some competition is “quite healthy,” said RenewableUK vice chair Úna Brosnan. “It’s a little bit of fun to be honest. We need to keep it interesting.”

But the sector has “talked about commercialisation long enough,” she said. It’s now about “industrialisation, getting strategic investment, and getting volume out."

‘Sector can’t stick its head in the sand on China’

Willow also stressed the importance of the sector getting to grips with the growing role of China in the market.

China will he said according to a Bloomberg estimate account for around a third of the market by 2040.

That’s going to bring a “huge amount of innovation” and there is also a “huge amount of supply chain there as well.”

It will be crucial for players in Europe, the US and other parts of APAC to understand how to “benefit” from that learning, he said.

“We can’t stick our head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening. We can’t just assume the China market is going to be entirely self-contained.”

“This is a thorny issue that we’re going to need to grapple with going forward.”