Norway deadline looms for three floating wind projects

Three areas have been designated for floating wind – Norway’s continental shelf drops away fairly suddenly, so fixed-bottom turbines are not feasible – in the Utsira Nord area.

The areas are also not huge in terms of generation capacity – the Ministry of Energy says each cannot exceed 500MW, although in total this would still amount to 1.5GW.

“The three applicants who receive the highest overall score in the qualitative competition will each be awarded a project area,” says the Ministry. “The applicant with the highest score will be awarded their preferred project area, the applicant with the second highest score will be awarded their preferred project area among the remaining two project areas, and the applicant with the third highest score will be awarded the last project area.”

Once awarded, the applicants will qualify to apply for state funding through a sealed bid auction process.

Floating wind for oil and gas

Norway has 89 offshore wind projects at one stage or other, but just three of them. all floating, are operational, according to analyst 4C Offshore, and two are only demonstrators.

They include the Hywind Tampen site that provides electricity to Equinor’s oil and gas fields Snorre and Gullfaks in the Norwegian North Sea.

With a system capacity of 94.6MW it is also the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm, Equinor claims, and ‘an important step forward in industrialising solutions and reducing costs for future offshore wind power projects’. It consists of 11 wind turbines.

The other two projects, UNITECH Zefyros, co-developed by Equinor and Siemens Wind Power, and the TetraSpar Demonstrator – Metcentre, owned by Shell, Stiesdal and RWE, are single-turbine demonstrators.

Norway is going to have to get a move on if it wants to hit its 2040 target to allocating enough areas to produce 30,000MW of wind.