Norwegian Offshore Wind‘s Floating Wind Days wrapped up on Thursday in Haugesund, having gathered over 700 representatives from the industry, research and government agencies.
A guest of honour this year was Jonas Gahr Støre, who said that “Norway needs more electricity, more grid and more efficiency”. He points out that floating wind will play a huge part in providing the power the country needs. The scale of the effort required will be unprecedented, in terms of manpower, industrial output and required innovation.
Other keynote speakers were Melanie Onn, Senior Advisor at the Blakeney Group, who provided the UK perspective on the ongoing offshore wind surge. David Hochschild, chairman of the California Energy Commission, gave an overview of California’s remarkable renewables push.
Ditlev Engel, CEO of DNV (a NorthWind partner), expanded on the challenges that must be met to fulfill offshore wind ambitions. Three major challenges are to reduce costs; scale and industrialise (with farms of 800 MW capacity and more, and turbines of upwards of 15 MW); and increase applicability (to allow wind farms at greater depths, further from shore and in more challenging meteorological and ocean conditions).
Nicolas de La Grandville, the EU’s ambassador to Norway, concluded the opening day’s keynote roster with an address focused on energy security, on meeting climate targets and on seizing a valuable business opportunity to develop a new industry for Europe.
Day one’s afternoon programme included sessions focusing on the USA, France, Italy, the UK, Portugal, Spain, South Korea and Japan.
On day two, NorthWind director John Olav Tande held a presentation titled “Research to reduce the LCOE of floating wind farms”. He was joined on stage by Leif Delp (Equinor) Jesper Møller (Stiesdal Offshore) and Jon Kippenes (Fred Olsen Seawind).
The conference concluded with a series of excursions to the METCentre’s test turbines at sea.
