Rosemary interviews Jim Papadopoulos, the CEO and co-founder of T-Omega Wind, about their unique floating offshore wind turbine design. Resembling a ferris wheel, the lightweight T-Omega turbine aims to overcome challenges like high costs and difficult maintenance faced by traditional offshore wind farms. Learn about the innovative features of this design and the progress made so far, including the installation of a prototype off the coast of Massachusetts. Visit https://t-omegawind.com/

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Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to a special episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Rosie Barnes, and I have with me today Jim Papadopoulos, who is the co founder, chief engineer, and CEO at T Omega Wind. Thanks for joining us, Jim. Pleasure to be here. So T Omega Wind is a unique floating offshore wind turbine.

It's designed to take advantage of being on the water rather than trying to force an onshore design to work on the water. It's designed to be lightweight in the expectation that will enable improvements in cost and manufacturability. We've actually spoken about Tiermaker on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast before, it was episode 132.

It most resembles a ferris wheel, I would say, if I was trying to find some, yeah, analogy. So it's got a four legged pyramid frame that supports a rotor in between the two halves. So it's got, frame on the upwind side and the downwind side of the rotor. Since we spoke about them on the podcast, Hairmaker's made some progress.

They've installed a 1 16th scale prototype off the coast of Massachusetts. And I'm going to ask him how that went a little later on in the podcast. But first, Jim, let's start at the start and find out your origin story. What motivated you to create a new floating offshore design?

Jim Papadopolous: Well, I have to say, I didn't set out to say there's got to be a new one.

And here it is I was entranced by offshore wind. And shocked by the costs. This is first bottom fixed and then floating only slowly. I came to realize that floating is, was really not a product yet, that there are just trials and ideas. But looking at offshore wind, we could see a bunch of things very heavy floating foundations, great difficulty of repair, infrastructure and supply chain needs especially as the capacities kept getting bigger and bigger in a way, because the cost of electricity was high.