Floating windfarms to achieve cost-parity by 2030

Floating windfarms will be able to compete on price with their fixed offshore counterparts by the end of the decade, a developer has predicted.

Nailia Dindarova, public affairs lead at Principle Power, told a renewable energy conference organised by Westminster Forum yesterday (14 January) that the technology for delivering offshore floating windfarms is already reliable.

And the price of electricity generated by the floating facilities, which are not tethered to the seabed but mounted on buoyant platforms, will soon be competitive with fixed offshore turbines, she said: “By 2030 we will be talking about cost parity. It might be before that, depending on how fast we go.”

The key to driving down the cost of the technology is the speed with which it can be rolled out, Dindarova said: “We need to go down the learning curve and pathway of industrialisation.

“It’s a chicken and egg problem. If governments don’t want to invest because it’s too expensive, then we will never get the scale and will never get the costs down. We know it works, the next step is to bring the cost down.”

She added: “There is no reason why floating wind will not be able to reach the cost reduction seen in fixed wind.”

And she told delegates that the advantage of the less stable floating devices is that they can be entirely pre-manufactured onshore and do not have to be installed in specific locations.

Dindarova added that the scale of floating turbines that can be deployed is increasing, pointing to the Portuguese-based company’s 50MW project in Kincardine Scotland, which is coming online later this year.  This features a 9.5MW turbine, which she said will be the largest deployed so far on a floating facility.

Rebecca Williams, head of policy and regulation at RenewableUK, said the UK’s Continental shelf, where the water is shallow enough to allow the deployment of seaside-fixed turbines is not big enough to accommodate the scale of offshore wind power that the UK will need in order to meet its renewable power targets.

“As we deploy more and more offshore wind, the best sites on the seabed are going to get used up. We are going to need the geographical diversity that floating wind can give us around the UK to make sure we hit these higher levels of deployment. We need actively to put that in place today.”

She also called on the government to introduce a more regular timetable for contract for difference (CfD) auctions in order to meet its recently increased target to roll out 40GW of offshore wind power by 2030.

“We need an urgent action plan for how we deliver these high levels of offshore wind. For the industry that means annual CfD auctions so we have that regular and predictable drip-feed of deployment,” Williams said, adding that environmental and statutory bodies require “proper” resources to help with the offshore consent process.