Principle Power and Aker among winners in US Energy Department phase two floating wind prize
Five awardees will receive cash and technology assistance and a chance to enter final round as part of Biden administration's push to 15GW by 2035
Floating wind technology firm Principle Power and partner Aker Solutions joined four other winners of the US Department of Energy (DoE)'s phase two floating offshore wind readiness (Flowin) prize announced Wednesday.
Principle Power-Aker joint venture (JV)'s fourth generation WindFloat triangular platform is already commercially deployed in three projects in Portugal and Scotland totalling 75MW.
Operational projects enabled the JV “to extract highly valuable feedback from the supply chain to better enable project successes on the first wave of US West Coast projects,” said Seth Price, vice president of technology & innovation for Principle Power.
Principle Power-Aker’s FloatHOME consortium based in California assessed large-scale fabricators and small supply chain partners on their existing capabilities to produce subcomponent modules and efficient assembly within American ports.
“The Flowin prize has provided us with a unique opportunity to explore ways to serialise fabrication, drive further innovation and reduce costs for floating offshore wind,” said Christoffer Valstad, senior vice president, renewables US at Aker Solutions.
The three-phase Flowin prize will award a total of $5.75m, plus vouchers for technical support from DoE national laboratories to transition floating platform technologies to serial production, while fostering competitive domestic supply chains.
The narrowed field of five phase two winners were judged “on their progress in developing a plan for mass production and assembly of floating offshore wind energy platforms”, DoE said.
Each of the five phase two winners receives a cash prize of $450,000 and a $100,000 technical support voucher and are eligible to compete in the final round.
“The innovative concepts produced by the winners of this phase will help make the nation’s offshore wind goals a reality,” said Eric Lantz, director of DoE’s Wind Energy Technologies Office.
“We look forward to the competition’s final phase and seeing how these teams’ ideas can help bridge the gap between the offshore wind industry’s great potential and the commercialisation solutions needed to realise that potential.”
Other winners include: