Session: New & Innovative Floating Designs I

Paper Number: 99316

99316 - Nextfloat: The Next Generation of Floating Offshore Wind Turbine 

Since the Hywind Demo project, the first Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (FOWT) of 2.3 MW installed 12 km offshore Karmøy island, South West of Norway by Equinor in 2009, up to the ongoing Hywind Tampen floating wind farm composed of 11 units of 8.6 MW to provide electricity for the Snorre and Gullfaks oil and gas fields in the Norwegian North Sea, most of the FOWT deployed are spread moored to the seabed and use upwind 3 bladed turbines.

Some other small scale prototypes using catenary or tension legs, spread or single point moorings, single or multi-turbine configurations and upwind or downwind turbines were also tested during this period in a variety of environments.

The NextFloat project has been awarded, together with 2 others, the HORIZON-CL5-2021-D3-03-12 call of the European Commission and is now in the Grant Agreement Preparation phase. NextFloat will engineer and build an innovative weathervanning concept of FOWT that will be deployed and operate on the Mistral test site in the South of France near Marseille. The unit will be a 6 MW version of the PivotBuoy currently being deployed by X1-Wind on the PLOCAN site in the Canary Islands.

The presentation will show the design basis of the project, the key challenges and the different innovations to be studied and will also highlight how this platform can be more suitable for the future 20MW+ turbines.

Presenting Author: Marc Cahay Technip Energies