Major OW Players Team Up with Universities to Reduce Costs (UK)

A large collaboration, which aims to reduce costs of offshore wind by decreasing the amount of steel used in foundations, has emerged under the Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) scheme.

Led by DONG Energy, the partners working on this research project intend to find a solution to design foundations that will require less steel and in that way cut offshore wind costs by 40% throughout the decade, Bloomberg writes. Currently, a monopile foundation weighs 600 tons, and that increases the construction costs.

The results of the project are scheduled to be published at the beginning of 2015, as the project will last for 18 months.

Apart from DONG Energy, the companies involved with this project are: RWE, Statoil, Statkraft, SSE, Iberdrola’s Scottish Power division and Vattenfall, along with researchers from the University of Oxford, University College Dublin and Imperial College London.

At the beginning of this year, DONG Energy said that it can meet the UK Government’s target of GBP 100/MWh for offshore wind energy by 2020, and it can even reduce costs to achieve GBP 87/MWh. Later on, the company also introduced its new cable laying concept as another way to save time and money.

[mappress]

Offshore WIND Staff, August 8, 2013; Image: DONG Energy