BlueFloat, Falck Renewables Looking Into Building Floating Wind Farms in Celtic Sea

BlueFloat Energy and Falck Renewables, which have already partnered to develop floating offshore wind projects in Scotland and Italy, are now also exploring opportunities for building floating wind farms in the Celtic Sea off the coast of Cornwall and Wales.

“The Celtic Sea offers great potential for deploying floating offshore wind farms due to the excellent wind resource, characteristics of the coast and the availability of the suitable infrastructure and skilled supply chain. It should play a key role in UK’s ambition to achieve net zero and 40 GW offshore and 1 GW floating offshore wind by 2030”, the companies said in a press release on 7 October.

The partners said they had actively engaged in the consultation carried out by the Crown Estate to put in place an enabling framework for the projects in the Celtic Sea to act as stepping stones to full scale industrial deployment of floating wind projects.

In Scotland, BlueFloat Energy and Falck Renewables are bidding in the ScotWind leasing round together with Ørsted, who joined the consortium this summer. For their Scottish floating wind project(s), the companies have now also entered into co-operation with Energy4All to work on opportunities for Scottish communities to own a stake in the consortium’s offshore wind projects.

At the beginning of this month, Falck Renewables and BlueFloat Energy formed an equal partnership in Italy to develop floating offshore wind farms off the country’s coast, and announced the start of the authorisation process for the first project in Puglia, called Kailia Energia, in the waters off Brindisi, which could have an installed capacity of around 1.2 GW.

The companies are set to file the necessary documentation with the Ministry for Ecological Transition to start the authorisation process, which will start with a preliminary consultation. At the same time, the request for a maritime concession will be submitted to the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Port Authority of the Southern Adriatic Sea.

Along with the now three locations where BlueFloat and Falck have partnered to build floating wind farms, Madrid-headquartered BlueFloat Energy is also proposing to build a 1 GW floating wind project in Spain, off the coast of the region of Empordá, near the Gulf of Roses in Catalonia.

The total planned capacity would be installed in two phases of 500 MW, with between 30 and 40 floating wind turbines installed per phase.

For its project in Spain, for which BlueFloat has partnered with the Spanish engineering group Sener, the company aims to begin the permitting process this year and expects it to be completed in 2023. If everything goes according to plan, the floating wind farm could be operational in 2026.