A Texas company has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with private wind developer Eolica Brasil over the supply of a mobile offshore jack-up platform for meteorological testing off the Brazilian state of Ceara
The MoU gives the Brazilian firm and Offshore Wind Power Systems of Texas, based in Dallas, one year to negotiate the platform sales contract.
The meteorological test site is within an area between five and 25km from the shore where Eolica Brasil wants to locate its multi-billion-dollar Asa Branca wind project. The company has obtained necessary marine, aviation and environmental permits, according to chief executive Marcello Storrer Prado Garcia.
The two sides will collaborate on site-specific platform design, manufacture, assembly, installation and delivery. The document leaves open the possibility of further sales of platforms as needed for Asa Branca.
Eolica Brasil would equip the Y-shaped Titan 200 model platform with a meteorological mast, a range of weather sensors, avian radar, oceanographic devices, soil boring equipment, and small wind and solar-energy generators.
Water depths in the Asa Branca site are less than 30 meters. The Titan 200 has design capacity to lift the heaviest wind turbine in use today and those planned up to 10MW in a maximum 100 meters of water, according to Offshore Wind Power Systems chief executive Doug Hines. Plans call for Asa Branca to use 5MW turbines which would require a Titan platform of 1,800 tonnes steel for support.
Hines says the Titan 200 can be assembled either in a dry dock or on a dock, and quayside infrastructure exists along the northern Brazil coast to do this. Once the jack up platform is assembled, the met mast or turbine is then erected on the hull. In a 2010 interview with Recharge, Garcia said he was four years from starting construction of the pioneering Asa Branca project.
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Source: pr, September 23, 2011