Offshore wind and the winning tickets for the coming years

“The offshore wind sector is entering a new phase requiring a massive manufacturing and installation scale-up. Building a subsidy-free offshore wind farm should not mean that the companies involved make losses. We have to be economically sustainable as an industry. Therefore, it is vital to innovate to reduce costs further.” Says Jan van der Tempel, Chairman of GROW. “Mind you, we have to build 1000 turbines annually to drive the global energy transition. To make this happen, we must     speed up all processes and align the complete supply chain.”

https://grow-to-go.nl/202207-lets-execute

Meet the team who loves spinning around monopiles.

The monopile foundations of wind turbines are subject to repeated (cyclic) loading by wind and waves. These forces are transferred from the foundation to the supporting soil, in a way that may affect the stability of the whole system. As the longer-term impact of cyclic loads is not yet fully understood, monopiles still tend to be designed on the safe side. If we understood better this behaviour, we could improve the design of monopiles to obtain lower fabrication costs. Federico Pisanò (Delft University of Technology) and Maria Konstantinou (Deltares) explain how the Monopile Improved Design through Advanced cyclic Soil modelling project (MIDAS) is helping to achieve that.

https://grow-to-go.nl/202205-midas

Improving wind measurements to optimise power performance. To gain the most power from the installed wind turbines offshore and onshore, they must operate at their absolute best. That's why the Sensor Assisted Wind farm Optimisation (SAWOP) project was initiated. Koen Hermans (TNO) and Jan Coelingh (Vattenfall) explain how SAWOP will help prove that nacelle LiDAR and spinner sensor technologies can optimise the power performance of wind turbines.

https://grow-to-go.nl/202203-sawop

Twist and shake it fast! | Grow To Go (grow-to-go.nl)

How to prevent damage to rotor blades

Rotor blades are made of strong materials that look indestructible, yet they get damaged by water and that costs a lot of money. Harald van der Mijle Meijer (TNO), and Julie Teuwen (TU Delft), put on their rainboots to research how rain impacts the wind turbines’ rotor blades. The goal? To get more insight into how the damage of blades evolves and even better: how to prevent it.

How to combine the best features of all materials and put it together in large structures.

Offshore wind support structures make a significant part in the total cost of an offshore wind turbine. They continuously need to cope with a wide range of forces from wind, waves and currents, over the full lifespan of the project. Marko Pavlović, assistant professor at TU Delft, and Maxim Segeren, managing director at Tree Composites, introduce an innovation that might reduce the production cost of such foundations by 25 to 50%. Even without a direct quotation of their inventors, these numbers already show that their wrapped composite joints can change the world of offshore wind for the better.

Listen to their stories.

Steel does not “react that optimal” to these offshore conditions that cause degradation.

The corrosion of monopiles, a threat to the future of offshore wind? Senior scientist Richard Pijpers and project manager Joke Luyten, both working at TNO, want to improve the design and optimise maintenance of monopiles. How? To get a better understanding of the degradation – caused by corrosion and fatigue – of the offshore wind structures. Listen to their stories.

Offshore wind installations might be a wonderful solution to a serious problem for humans, the underwater sea life is now negatively impacted instead. Linda Kemp, project manager at MARIN shows how bubbles can prevent wind turbine installation noise that harms sea life. This is, she stresses, a “really nice topic to work on”, and it’s especially “fascinating to do new things, with an aim to protect the sea life and to improve the sustainability of the ocean.”

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Offshore wind energy has gone through tremendous developments in recent years. Innovation was a key driver for its success. If offshore wind wants to make a lasting contribution to the energy transition, the sector must continue to innovate. David de Jager of GROW - a consortium with a joint research program in offshore wind - gives you in this podcast series an impression of the key research and innovations that will shape the future of offshore wind.