Floating wind turbine testing
A floating wind turbine has undergone extreme testing at Ireland’s national ocean test facility as part of a two-day offshore wind energy conference hosted by the MaREI Centre for Marine and Renewable Energy in County Cork.
More than 50 leading experts in offshore wind energy from across Europe were invited to the conference to discuss the findings of the €10 million LEANWIND project examining offshore wind energy.
The LEANWIND project, which is co-ordinated by Dr Jimmy Murphy of MaREI, was established to examine potential cost reductions in offshore wind energy to make it competitive with other non-renewable forms of energy generation.
Speaking at the conference, Dr Murphy said: “The requirement for achieving cost reductions is stronger than ever and this is good news for LEANWIND as there is a real appetite for the innovations being developed in the project – these include autonomous robots for operations and maintenance tasks, novel vessel designs, use of virtual reality for crew training and a patent pending floating wind turbine.”
As part of the conference, a scaled version of the floating wind turbine was demonstrated for delegates in the wave tank of the Lir National Ocean Test Facility. The tank, which can produce waves up to 1.1 m in height, was used to show how the floating wind turbine would perform in extreme storm conditions off the west coast of Ireland.
Data suggests that Ireland has one of the best resources in Europe for harnessing offshore wind energy has the potential for up to 4.5GW installed capacity by 2030, with the capacity to power 4.5 million homes per annum.
By Anne-Marie Causer
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