Floating production, storage and offloading vessel

Hywind Tampen: the world’s first renewable power for offshore oil and gas

Published

1 year ago

5 October 2023

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Hywind Tampen is the world’s first floating wind farm built specifically to power offshore oil and gas installations, and is now supplying electricity to Equinor’s oil and gas fields Snorre and Gullfaks in the Norwegian North Sea.

With a system capacity of 88 MW it is also the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm and an important step forward in industrialising solutions and reducing costs for future offshore wind power projects.

With Hywind Tampen now operational, Equinor is now operating nearly half (47 per- cent) of the world’s offshore floating wind capacity.

Hywind Tampen will be a test bed for further development of floating wind, exploring the use of new and larger turbines, installations methods, simplified moorings, concrete substructures and integration between gas and wind power generation systems.

The floating wind farm consists of 11 wind turbines which have been upgraded from 8 to 8.6 MW. Although the export system capacity and the platforms have not been up- graded accordingly, the increased capacity should contribute to an increased overall yearly production due to increased uptime. Operational experience will also contribute to improving the production capacity through increased utilisation rate.

The wind farm is estimated to meet about 35% of the annual electricity power demand of the five Snorre A and B, and Gullfaks A, B and C platforms. In periods with higher wind speeds this percentage will be significantly higher.

The wind power solution will help reduce the use of gas turbine power for the Snorre and Gullfaks offshore fields, while also offsetting 200,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions and 1,000 tonnes of NOx emissions per year.

Together with our partners in the Snorre and Gullfaks fields, we reached a final investment decision (FID) in October 2019 and awarded key contracts for the NOK 5 billion project in the same month.

The Hywind Tampen project

The project will contribute to further developing floating offshore wind technology and reducing the cost of future floating offshore wind farms, offering new industrial opportunities for Norway, the fields and the Norwegian supplier industry in a growing global offshore wind market.

• Hywind Tampen partners: Equinor, Petoro, OMV, Vår Energi, Wintershall Dea and INPEX Idemitsu Norge AS

• Total system capacity: 88 MW

• Location: About 140 km off the Norwegian coast

• Water depth between 260 and 300 metres

• Installed on floating concrete spar struc- tures with a shared anchoring system

• The wind turbines will be connected in a 2.5 km-long inter-array network with a capacity of 66 kV

• Commenced producing power in the third quarter of 2022 and in full operation as of summer 2023

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BW Ideol unveils its standard floating foundation for mass production with a disruptive market approach

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Floating production, storage and offloading vessel

BW Ideol unveils its standard floating foundation for mass production with a disruptive market approach

Published

3 months ago

20 September 2024

Mesut Kul

BW Ideol unveils its standard floating foundation for mass production with a disruptive market approach

During the FOWT event in Marseille, BW Ideol, one of the global leaders in the sector, unveiled its brand-new market approach combining standardization and mass production to a selected panel of utilities and partners.

With over 22 GW already awarded in Scotland, around 8 GW in the USA, and several GW currently being awarded or in the tendering phase elsewhere in the world, floating wind is now entering an industrialization phase.

With the aim of accompanying and driving this evolution, BW Ideol now offers a standardized floating foundation product – based on the Damping Pool® solution in operation since 2018 in France and Japan.

This universal floating foundation is optimized for all meteocean conditions prevailing on the main floating wind markets (with 3 product classes adapted to different environmental conditions) and compatible with all 15 MW+ wind turbines currently available. This product retains the competitive advantages of the Damping Pool® patent, particularly its compactness, with dimensions limited to 54 meters, and its shallow draft, below 12 meters in operation. It can be easily scalable to the next 20 MW+ wind turbines when available. This standard product, pre-certified in advance, unlocks mass-production by allowing multiple projects to be supplied from the same manufacturing line.

BW Ideol has also unveiled its manufacturing line blueprint, easily scalable and replicable on multiple port infrastructures, for the mass production of concrete floating foundations. This blueprint, optimizing each manufacturing steps, has a demonstrated capacity to produce up to one floating foundation per week, with minimal harbour requirements, guaranteeing local manufacturing and delivery time. It encompasses the structuration of the supply chain to ensure a lean manufacturing, its digitalization, quality control and a reduced carbon footprint.

Associated with the standard product, this manufacturing blueprint unleashes the volume effect to drive costs down across projects and provides developers with an early guarantee on price and delivery schedule. BW Ideol is the first floating foundation supplier to propose such an approach.

“The floating wind market is at a crossroads today: tens of gigawatts will need to be built in the coming years, requiring a change in paradigm from the floating foundation suppliers. We believe that adopting an approach similar to that of wind turbine manufacturers is necessary: offering a single and standard product, suitable for all geographies and turbines available on the market, produced in series based on manufacturing line serving multiple projects, so that developers can truly commit and know where they are heading” declared Paul de la Guérivière, Founder and CEO of BW Ideol.