Comprehensive Shared-Mooring Solutions to Minimize the Cost, Risk, and Footprint of GW-Scale Floating Wind Farms
Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC
Recipient
Golden, CO
Recipient Location
$1,081,893
Amount Spent
Active
Project Status
Project Update
In earlier stages of the project, the team developed a guide outlining the requirements and conditions for a shared mooring system, along with a methodology to quickly screen design concepts before advancing the most promising ones. Over the past year, they applied this process to develop several mooring and anchor design options, incorporating considerations such as local infrastructure, stakeholder feedback, and environmental impacts. They also prepared preliminary installation plans that showed increasing complexity as shared mooring designs with more couplings between adjacent turbines. These evaluations ultimately led to selecting a balanced design that will now advance to wave basin testing.
The Issue
Floating wind farms rely on mooring lines and anchors to keep each turbine in position and limit their horizontal motions so that power cables are not strained. In the deep waters found off California, conventional mooring approaches face challenges. Longer mooring lines are required to reach the seabed, increasing the material use, cost, and footprint of the mooring systems. The space needed for each mooring line can cause difficulties in maintaining adequate clearances around mooring lines and power cables. Seismic activity in the region poses a further challenge by increasing the risk of anchors failing. These challenges call for mooring solutions that are more cost-efficient, compact, and resilient to component failures.
Project Innovation
This project will develop comprehensive shared mooring system solutions that minimize the costs, failure risks, and environmental impacts of GW-scale floating wind farms in California. The approach combines state-of-the-art techniques for sharing mooring lines and anchors with installation and maintenance innovations that bring additional cost reductions and reliability improvements. Strategic use of shared mooring lines will make the designs especially resilient to anchor failures, which will be critical to the viability of large-scale floating wind farms in California.
Project Goals
Project Benefits
The project will lower electricity costs and improve electricity reliability. These benefits are the result of the project’s support for the feasibility, cost reduction, and risk reduction of floating offshore wind farms in California
Affordability
The up-front installation costs and operations and maintenance costs for mooring systems will be reduced.
Reliability
The redundancy and resilience inherent in the mooring system designs will provide greater reliability in electricity generation by reducing the potential of individual failures to cascade into larger failures that disrupt overall production of a wind farm.
Key Project Members
Matthew Hall
Subrecipients
Texas A&M University
University of Iowa
Cal Poly Humboldt Sponsored Programs Foundation
H.T. Harvey and Associates
Principle Power
American Bureau of Shipping
Delmar Systems, Inc.
Match Partners
Texas A&
M University
University of Iowa
H.T. Harvey and Associates
Schatz Energy Research Center
Principle Power
American Bureau of Shipping
Delmar Systems, Inc.
