Offshore wind veterans unveil 'groundbreaking' floating wind connector
Offshore wind veterans unveil 'groundbreaking' floating wind connector | Windpower Monthly
Encomara will unveil its first patented product – a maritime connection device called Squid – today (4 October) at an offshore wind conference in Scotland
Squid is a floating connector that integrates the hardware of a floating offshore wind turbine, including power cables, connectors, mooring lines and anchors into a single unit.
The company claims the system could provide a more rapid rollout and a faster “plug to power”, as well as “significantly reduce the levelised cost of electricity” generated with floating offshore wind.
Squid also allows for pre-installation and pre-commissioning of the associated hardware, to reduce the costs and risks of doing so later in the development process, the firm added.
Encomara chief operating officer Ian Cobban and chief technology officer Malcolm Bowie bring their offshore experience working at maritime engineering firm Subsea7 to the new firm. The leadership team is completed by CEO Raymond Semple and Ian Donald as executive chairman.
Floating wind is more suitable in areas where deep coastal waters would make traditional fixed-bottom foundations for offshore wind turbines problematic.
The world’s largest floating offshore wind farm, the 88MW Hywind Tampen project, was recently inaugurated in the Norwegian North Sea. It is being used by owners Equinor to power the company’s fossil fuel extraction efforts in the region.
Related Knowledge Center: Offshore wind energy
Over the next decade, U.S. offshore wind power is expected to grow from a single 30-megawatt wind farm off Rhode Island to more than 2,000 MW of capacity along the Atlantic Seaboard. There are contracts for wind power off the coasts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Virginia.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated the United States has over 4,000 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind potential, enough to power the country four times over.
The growth in part being spurred by state solicitations, including in New York, where then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) set a commitment of 9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035, and in Connecticut, where in June 2021, Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed legislation authorizing the construction of 2,000 MW of offshore wind by 2030.
The offshore development is also being driven by an investment tax credit set to end in December 2019 and is equal to 12 percent of expenditures. U.S. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tom Carper (D-Del.) have introduced a bill to extend the tax credit for up to eight years.
The Interior Department has held eight competitive lease sales that resulted in 15 offshore wind leases over 1.7 million acres that has the potential for 21 GW of capacity. In February 2022, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management completed a bidding process that realized $4.37 billion for 488,000 acres across six lease areas in federal waters off New York and New Jersey.
Projects have also been proposed off the Southeast coast, off California and Hawaii, and for the Great Lakes.