The Carbon Trust has signed a groundbreaking agreement in offshore wind with five international energy companies: DONG Energy (Denmark), Airtricity Developments (UK), RWE Innogy (Germany), ScottishPower Renewables (UK) and StatoilHydro (Norway).
This marks the start of a major new research, development and demonstration initiative called the Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA).
Worth up to £30million over the next five years, the OWA aims to cut the cost of offshore wind energy by 10% or more through a combination of windfarm cost reductions and performance improvements.
It is widely believed that offshore wind has the greatest potential of all renewable energy technologies to get somewhere near delivering the UK’s 2020 renewable energy targets, bearing in mind that there has already been considerable slippage.
The Carbon Trust warns that delivering this potential will be a significant challenge. It says that OWA is designed to help tackle one of the key barriers to offshore wind deployment – the rising costs of projects, which have more than doubled over the last five years.
It will do this by taking up key opportunities in technology development in a collaborative approach that shares the associated costs and risks. For this reason, the launch of the OWA marks a major step forward for the industry.
The OWA represents the Carbon Trust’s part of its joint initiative with the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), launched in December, 2007.
Mark Williamson, director of innovations at the Carbon Trust, said in a statement designed to coincide with the British Wind Energy Association’s conference in London last month: “Offshore wind has huge potential to cut the UK’s carbon emissions, generate thousands of new jobs and help us meet our 2020 renewable targets. But high costs and risks have been seriously holding back deployment.
“We have identified a range of opportunities to reduce costs, increase performance and improve the economic viability of offshore windfarms. This new collaborative initiative brings together five leading energy companies to encourage technology innovation and significantly accelerate growth in the sector at this crucial time.”
The Offshore Wind Accelerator will focus on cost and risk reduction in the short to medium term, covering key topics related to windfarm design, construction and operation, including:
Offshore foundations – developing novel forms of wind turbine foundation with potential for lower capital and installation costs than designs currently in use, including consideration of deepwater sites.
Wake effects – consolidating knowledge about wake effects in large arrays to improve the accuracy of yield assessment processes, allowing windfarm lay-outs to be optimised and financing costs to be reduced.
Access, logistics and transportation – developing economic and safe access systems for windfarm construction and operation to maximise turbine availability, and thus yields.
Electrical systems – assessing opportunities to maximise the efficiency of offshore windfarm electrical systems, minimising losses in both the intra-farm array and transmission to shore in order to maximise delivered electricity.
The initial phase of the OWA will involve a set of detailed feasibility studies, tenders for which will be invited later in 2008. Large-scale demonstration projects are expected to follow from 2010 onwards.
Two of the signatories to the agreement, DONG and StatoilHydro are especially well placed to bring their experience in the North Sea oil&gas industry to the Offshore Wind Accelerator.
Moreover, Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group and East of England Energy Group are the best placed of the various regional initiatives to provide a bridgehead between the huge experience of offshore oil&gas and the now fast-emerging offshore wind industry. And the annual All-Energy show in Aberdeen is the number-one forum in the UK where the two industries can rub shoulders and spark off.
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