Croatian shipyard Brodosplit has completed the fabrication of the buoy ordered by Ocergy, which will equip it with a LiDAR and systems to collect metocean and biodiversity data, both aerial and marine, before deploying the platform in the French AO6 offshore area, for which the floating wind tendering procedure is underway.
Ocergy’s French subsidiary Ocergie was granted permits by the French Prefect Maritime in September to deploy the OCG-Data buoy in the AO6 area in Golfe du Lion in the Mediterranean Sea, where two sites for floating offshore wind will be developed, each with a planned installed capacity of about 250 MW with potential extensions leading to a total capacity of 1.5 GW.
This summer, the French government announced that 13 companies and consortia were selected to advance to the second phase, the competitive dialogue phase, of the tendering procedure.
Ocergy’s data collection buoy – the main part of its pilot OCG-Data project Blue Oracle (Buoy with Lidar and Underwater Equipment for Ocean Resource Assessment and Characterisation of Life in the Environment) – will be fitted with a Vaisala WindCube LiDAR and with TP Product’s structural compact flanges, a first use of the technology in primary structural members in a floating environment.
Besides Brodosplit which constructed the buoy, Ocergy’s main suppliers include Euroports for the buoy assembly and the shore base in Port-la-Nouvelle, and Vryhof for the anchor and mooring.
Ocergy’s strategic partners on the project, partly sponsored by ADEME (the French Agency for Ecological Transition), are the offshore wind developer Skyborn Renewables ( formerly known as wpd offshore); Tachysséma Développement, for the design and installation of the power management system and SCADA, for onboard instrumentation; University of Perpignan CREM – UPVD, for oversight of the bio-diversity marine studies; and the engineering consultancy Sense Of Life, for the sea birds tracking and analyses.
The project also has a scientific committee comprising the offshore wind developer Ocean Winds, CRPMEM (Regional Committee for Maritime Fisheries and Marine Farming), Ecocean, Semantic-T.S., Chorus, and Bureau Veritas.
In April last year, Ocergy concluded its Series A equity fundraising round to fund the development and commercialisation of both its OCG-Data environmental monitoring buoy and its floating wind turbine. The round saw investments from Moreld Ocean Wind and Chevron Technology Ventures, marking the entrance in the offshore wind sector for the latter.
Last year, the Salamander consortium signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Ocergy to evaluate its foundation design for the development in northeast Scotland. This October, the consortium awarded Ocergy with a pre-FEED foundation design contract for its 100 MW Salamander floating offshore wind project.