An energy industry working group has entered a partnership with three universities from England and Ireland to lower the cost of energy from offshore wind turbines.
The academic consortium, headed by Dong Energy, will work on the research and development project with Oxford University, Imperial College London and University College Dublin.
The aim of the partnership, which also includes RWE, Statoil, Statkraft, SSE, Scottish Power and Vattenfall, is to find technological solutions to be implemented in time the large Round 3 offshore wind projects in the UK.
The move follows a similar partnership struck between Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University and SeaEnergy to look at the lowering operation and maintenance costs for offshore wind farms.
“The cost of energy from offshore wind turbines must be reduced,” said Bent Christensen, senior vice president at Dong Energy Wind Power.
“I’m very pleased that we and our working group have succeeded in entering into cooperation with institutions as reputable as the consortium led by the University of Oxford to assist our work on reducing the cost of development and installation of foundations.
“We expect to find significant savings by trimming monopile sizes and finding new ways of installing the foundations, amongst others.
“Consequently, we believe a significant contribution can come from this area towards our efforts of reducing the price of offshore wind power by 35-40 per cent by 2020.”
The cooperation will last 18 months and will fund a range of academic contributions as well as three PhD projects.
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