Launch of the FLOATECH project – The future of floating wind turbines!

Wind is one of the leading sources of renewables contributing to the EU's energy mix, and its exploitation is key to achieving many environmental and energy policy goals. As one of the world's technology leaders, Europe has seen its wind energy sector evolve into an important industry providing hundreds of thousands of jobs. Due to the limited number of installation sites available on land, offshore wind energy is becoming crucial to the growth of the sector. In this scenario, exploiting the vast wind resources in deeper waters with floating wind farms and developing the required technology will strengthen the EU economy and contribute to its green energy goals.

FLOATECH aims to accelerate this transition by increasing the technical maturity and cost competitiveness of floating offshore wind energy.

Launched in January 2021 for a duration of 3 years and coordinated by TU Berlin, FLOATECH is a European H2020 project bringing together five public research institutions, including Centrale Nantes and its LHEEA research lab, with relevant expertise in offshore floating wind energy and three industrial partners involved in the most recent developments of floating wind systems.

To achieve its objectives, the project is structured around two main activities:
 

• The development, implementation, and validation of a user-friendly and efficient design engineering tool (named QBlade-Ocean) performing simulations of floating offshore wind turbines with unprecedented aerodynamic and hydrodynamic accuracy. The more advanced modelling theories will lead to reduced uncertainties in the design process and increased turbine efficiency.
• The development of two innovative control techniques (i.e., Active Wave-based feed-forward Control and the Active Wake Mixing) for Floating Wind Turbines and floats, combining wave prediction and anticipation of induced platform motions. These techniques are expected to reduce the wake effects in floating wind farms, leading to a net increase in the annual energy production of the farm.

In addition to the technological and economic impact, the project is expected to have societal, environmental and political impact, such as: the use of less material and space through environmentally friendly design; promotion of the installation of FOW in transitional water depths (30-50 meters), no noise and visibility issues; less impact on biodiversity and wildlife habitat as there is no need to install piles in the seabed.

Christian Nayeri, FLOATECH project coordinator, said: “I expect that FLOATECH will contribute to the advancement of floating offshore wind energy technology by creating a deeper scientific knowledge base. A European network will be established with new collaboration. In the framework of the project many engineers with state-of-the-art floating wind expertise will be trained. By involving relevant stakeholders, the outcome of the project will be directly fed into the market. All in all, FLOATECH is a big opportunity to strengthen the leadership of European wind energy technology”.

In these first months we started to work on the different activities, and we defined our communication and dissemination strategy:
 

• We finalized different types of communication materials (a flyer, a factsheet, a poster, a roll-up banner and a newsletter) to raise awareness of the project,
• We launched the project website and social media, where people are demonstrating a great interest in our activities. To receive our updates, follow us on Twitter and a join us on LinkedIn!
• We are planning to have an exhibition booth at the WindEurope Electric City event, the leading-edge, international conference for the offshore wind industry. Come and meet us in Copenhagen on 23-25 November!