Scotland's floating wind ambitions and the hurdles to overcome

Buchan Offshore Wind, project developer for one of the ScotWind wind farms in the North Sea, was handing out slices of a cake made in the shape of a new design for an ocean-bound wind platform designed by one of its shareholders, a Singapore-owned company based in France called BW Ideol .

Called a “damping pool”, it’s a square-shaped ring made of concrete that has the effect of calming the waves inside the ring, helping to stabilise the turbine tower that sits on top of the whole structure that’s deployed far out at sea where conditions are often rough.

Most of the wind farms you see off the coast of Scotland and in many other parts of the world are in relatively shallow waters of up to 60 metres depth, using platforms fixed to the seabed.

But as improvements in turbine design have created ever-larger blades and towers – some as tall as the Eiffel Tower – the next frontier is so-called floating wind farms that use the greater sweep of these giant blades to capture more wind and thus generate more power.

They also use fewer turbines, saving up-front costs. The foundations on which they sit, made of tubular steel or concrete, float on the sea surface and are tethered by huge cables that snake down to seabed anchors as big as a Transit van.

It is floating wind that makes up about 60 per cent of what’s planned for ScotWind, a collection of 20 wind farms in the North Sea involving some of the world’s largest offshore wind players like SSE Renewables, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Ocean Winds, a joint venture between ENGIE of France and Portugal’s EDP Renewables.

Yet floating wind is still in its infancy. Globally, there are 87 gigawatts of fixed-bottom wind farmsin operation, according to RenewableUK’s Energy Pulse database, and a mere 277 megawatts of floating wind farms - all of them demonstrator projects designed to test the technology in real conditions. Two operate off the Aberdeenshire coast.

The hope is that Scotland, having launched ScotWind before most countries were starting to think about floating wind, can be the global leader in the race to make floating wind happen. “Floating offshore wind is not a niche innovation, it is a transformational force,” deputy first minister Kate Forbes told the conference.

Unfortunately, industry headwinds are making this a tough sell. Inflation-related cost rises, supply chain gaps and geopolitical uncertainty - not to mention US President Donald Trump’s attacks on “windmills” – have cast a chill over the industry. Last week, ScotWind received a setback with the withdrawal of Shell from two large floating wind projects.

“We all know how tough the market is right now,” said Jane Cooper, interim chief executive of industry association RenewableUK, which with Scottish Renewables organised the conference.

There are other hurdles. Ports are essential to the build-out of floating wind because this is where foundation manufacture and turbine assembly must happen. Some progress has been made, including at Ardesier Port near Inverness, Port of Nigg and nearby Port of Cromarty Firth, which nine months ago was awarded £55m from the UK government’s Floating Offshore Wind Manufacturing Investment Scheme for expansion that aims to establish the UK’s first custom-built integration hub for floating offshore windfarm construction. Yet lack of an overall strategy for ports combined with the reality that ports compete with each other, are complicating factors.

Another is money. The amounts needed for floating wind are huge, given that the size and scale of the kit involved is even larger than for fixed-bottom wind. Ossian, the largest of the ScotWind projects, envisages over 200 turbines, each fixed to some kind of foundation.

Lenders are unwilling to step forward until there is clear evidence that essential components like foundations can be produced at industrial scale to the same specifications, which is easier to finance. Given the long lead times involved in getting a wind farm up and running, there is another issue, as Simon Little, director of banking and investments at the UK’s National Wealth Fund, told the conference: “It is a challenge from a returns perspective. Financial capital has gone and found other things to invest in, such as data centres.”

This explains Buchan’s cake gimmick. BW Ideol says the damping pool is ready to go from a financing and manufacturing perspective after years of testing at other demonstrator projects. Clare Lavelle, Buchan’s project director, said that a French fabrication line for the damping pool for which the European Commission last week agreed a €74 million grant would be a model for its manufacturing plans in Scotland.

In the short term, the hope is that a set of mostly smaller projects that are to pave the way for the ScotWind wind farms, and known by the acronym INTOG, might kick-start a broader set of commitments between developers, ports and supply chain companies - in effect, releasing the industry from its current “chicken or egg” gridlock of commitment uncertainty.

One of them is Cenos, a wind farm that would cover an area slightly bigger than the city of Edinburgh. Another, half the size, is Green Volt, billed by its owners as the first commercial scale floating wind farm in Europe. A third set of INTOG wind farms are planned by Cerulean Winds, which plans a manufacturing hub at Ardesier. Laura Jarvie, the company’s head of Scotland, warned that with other ports from Norway to France racing to secure floating- wind assembly capacity, “the window to act is most certainly now or never”.

“We can either lead the market or attempt to compete internationally to service it from the sidelines”.