Offshore Wind Majors Launch Joint Industry Project For Floating Wind Installs

Aimed at improving technology development for floating offshore wind substations, a new Joint Industry Project (JIP) has been launched by DNV and 30 industry partners with a particular focus on how export cables and topside equipment tolerate movements of a floating substructure.

According to DNV, the objective is to align the best-practices of the industry allowing for accelerated technology development and to close gaps in available substation standards enabling scaling of floating offshore wind with an acceptable level of commercial, technical, health, safety, and environmental risks, .

The company developed the standard DNV-ST-0145 document, according to DNV, together with partners from the industry, which provides the technical requirements for the certification of electrical offshore substations.

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For its latest update, more than 500 industry comments were reflected in this standard which is of increased importance as a growing number of projects pursue new concepts. The results of this JIP will be used to update the standard making it applicable for floating offshore substations.

The companies that have joined the project as partners are ABB, Aibel, Aker Solutions, Atlantic Offshore Energy, BP, Burns & McDonell, EDF, Elia Group, Shell/Eolfi, Equinor, Falck Renewables, GE Renewable Energy, Gicon, Hitachi Energy, IV One & Nevesbu, Mitsubishi Electric, Northland Power, Oil States Industries, Ørsted, Prysmian, RWE, Saipem, Siemens Energy, SSE Renewables, Technip Energies, TechnipFMC, Terna Plus Srl, TotalEnergies, Wood PLC, and Worley.

DNV started looking for partners to launch a new JIP for floating offshore substations back in November 2021.

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Notably, the initiative seems to be aimed also at pushing standards and optimising technology that can take on competition from the Chinese firms making strides in the wind energy sector now. After wiping out most of the European and American firms in the solar sector, Chinese firms have now made impressive progress in wind energy, gaining market share rapidly as China has also ramped up domestic demand for wind energy. Offshore wind remains one of the last bastions of European and western dominance, but even here, the Chinese are gaining rapidly. With a long runway of growth and installations ahead, it is clear that the European and American incumbents are in no mood to give up as easily as in the solar sector.