Hitachi Zosen and Ideol to Start Building Japanese Floaters

Japan’s Hitachi Zosen and France’s Ideol signed a contract to launch the construction phase of their 2-turbine offshore wind project in Japan on 13 June, 2016.

Prior to this contract, the two companies signed an engineering agreement on 3 June 2015 for the design of both a concrete and a steel version of Ideol’s patented floating foundation adapted to Japanese sea conditions.

Hitachi Zosen’s Head of Offshore Wind Power Promotion Department, Tadashi Shibayama, said: “We very much appreciate our collaboration with Ideol on this floating offshore wind project. Our project team is particularly excited to pursue its work with Ideol’s engineers and experts.”

The two floaters will be each manufactured with different materials, namely concrete and steel, will be equipped with different wind turbines and will be anchored using different mooring line materials.

The construction of these two floating turbines is the result of a year-long collaboration between Hitachi Zosen’s and Ideol’s design and engineering teams, meeting all the ClassNK requirements in the process.

”We are particularly pleased to start the construction of our next two floaters in the world’s most advanced and leading market for floating offshore wind,” Paul de la Guérivière, Ideol’s CEO, said.

”We are fully confident in the global competitiveness of our technology and look forward to work on Japan’s first commercial scale floating wind farms with a leading partner such as Hitachi Zosen. Our teams have achieved tremendous work in record time together, confirming the undeniable benefits of Ideol’s strategy which is to integrate a maximum of the technical expertise in-house in order to provide our customers and partners with the immediate reactivity such capital intensive projects require.”