Innovator’s floating-wind design puts industry on solid foundation.
The U.S. offshore wind industry is facing a reset in 2024, particularly for floating offshore wind, said Habib Dagher, founder and executive director of the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composite Center.
The reset is necessary due to costs driven up from supply chain issues, exacerbated by the pandemic, infrastructure, and inflation, he said. “Some power purchase agreements signed two or three years ago are no longer able to cover the cost,” he said.
Dagher, who has been working in the floating wind space for 17 years, said the industry’s plight is no different than what the construction and transportation industries face. However, floating wind “is an industry that’s trying to get born in this environment; that makes it a lot harder.”
The nascent industry faces a Biden administration goal to have 30 gigawatts of U.S. fixed-bottom offshore wind installed by 2030, with an additional 15 GW of floating wind by 2035. However, energy research analyst BloombergNEF says manufacturing of wind energy is 29% off that goal, with only 16.4 GW expected by 2030.
‘Wind Shot’
About two-thirds of viable U.S. offshore wind resources are in deeper waters that can’t use fixed-bottom, “so floating wind unlocks two-thirds of U.S. offshore wind resources,” Dagher said. “The federal government has declared floating wind as a U.S. earth shot – they call it the wind shot,” he said. “These innovations in hull design and hull technologies are going to drive the floating wind industry forward.”
With some bizarre and false public statements about negative environmental and health impacts of wind energy, floating wind can skirt the “not-in-my-backyard” syndrome, he said.
“The beauty of floating wind is, you can prefabricate this hull and throw them out beyond the horizon where nobody knows they exist because they fall beyond the horizon,” he said. “It minimizes the impacts on the fisheries, the environment, and the birds and bats and mammals.”
More relevant is the fact that winds typically are much more beneficial the farther offshore they’re placed, he added.
Hull of Fame
UMaine’s Advanced Structures and Composite Center’s core work is in the floating wind space. “We have about 47 engineers that just work on floating wind in our laboratory,” Dagher said.
The fruits of the Center’s labor are a floating turbine, which uses a next-generation semi-submersible floating hull, VolturnUS. It’s smaller and easier to build, reducing the weight and footprint of the hull by 20% to 30%. The turbines will also be more quickly and easily produced and deployed off the coast of Monhegan Island, Maine.
VolturnUS’s hull has a tuned mass damper, also known as a harmonic absorber or seismic damper, a device mounted in structures to reduce mechanical vibrations. The damper negates the motion of the waves, making the turbine more stable, and removing the need to weight and size to stabilize.
“Think of buildings in earthquakes,” he said. “In earthquakes in California, you’ll see buildings that have a mass that moves back and forth at the top of the building that actually negates the motion of the earthquake.”
Capable of being locally manufactured, the “plus-sign-shaped” tower is created from composite materials to reduce capital, operation, and maintenance costs. The hull was funded through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) competitive Atlantis Program, whose goal is to develop next-generation floating wind technologies that are “transformational rather than evolutional,” Dagher said.
Solutions Coming
Regarding the wind energy supply chain, Dagher said the issues “all have solutions in them. Essentially, the supply chain is going to build up. I think the supply chain knows there’s a big pipeline coming forward, and the plants are being built, facilities are being prepared, port facilities are being built, vessels are being built and inflationary pressures are starting to ease. So, all of that is happening as we speak, and needs some time to catch up with the demand.”
The U.S. government has stepped in to provide favorable tax guidance “that we’ve been awaiting for some time,” he said. “Some states are stepping in to rebid project agreements, particularly New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts,” the epicenter of floating offshore wind development.
“There’s a very strong recognition from both state and federal government and agencies that we’ve tried to do too much too quick and haven’t really accounted for inflation and other costs,” he said.
Despite moves aimed at making up for lost time, it’s unknown how quickly the industry can recover some of the time that’s been lost, he said. “We’re going to eventually build the 30 GW we need to build, maybe not in 2030, maybe a couple of years later.”
Going forward, Dagher said bids on power purchase agreements are going to allow for some inflationary clauses “so we don’t fall back into the same trap that we fell before.”
‘Marshall Plan’ for Ports
Another obstacle to floating wind efforts is lack of port infrastructure to handle moving cargo, and to support the building of VolturnUS hulls for the floating wind turbines.
“It’s absolutely necessary that we make significant investments in port facilities in the United States for this industry to happen,” said Dagher, calling for a “Marshall Plan” for ports.
“We have not been investing enough at the federal level in our port infrastructure, so there needs to be significant intention to making some very targeted port investments to grow this industry.”
Beyond necessary for advancing needed infrastructure to support floating wind, the effort will also create thousands of jobs, or tens of thousands of jobs across the country,” he continued.
“We need to invest in ports and the East and West coasts and other places as well, that are capable of deploying hulls at one per week,” he said. “We’re talking about hulls like a big ship.”
Jones Act
Floating wind also requires the focus of the U.S. shipyards, as vessels solely calling U.S. ports must be U.S. made and U.S. crewed, to comply with the cabotage program under the Jones Act. (For more information see Jones Act story on page 2)
“We are starting to build ships in the U.S. again but is it going to be fast enough and good enough” to solve the lagging projects. Dagher said. “It’s slowing down our ability to do the work we need to do” and causing cancellation of some U.S. projects.
One solution would be to relax the Jones Act for a specific period of time, “to allow foreign-flag vessels to call U.S. ports to advance floating wind projects, while allowing shipyards to ramp up to handle the vessels.”
By hitting the pause button on the cabotage law period, “you can actually have some exception to the Jones Act to allow us to build our ships and our fleets ready, allows the industry to move forward, yet at the same time, allows us to build our fleet after that.”
“You can keep the Jones Act, but at least provide a few years of exception over the next five years or so to allow the industry to move forward as we build our own ships,” he said.
Innovation to Obsolescence
An important aspect that has hampered the wind energy supply chains – regardless of fixed-bottom or floating – has been the seemingly constant spiral of increasing turbine sizes.
When the earlier 1.5 MW turbines became the workhorse of the land-based industry, industrializing the process drove down costs, and made the industry competitive with fossil-based energy.
“There are turbines right now in the 15-megawatt range, and there are designs for turbines that are much bigger than that, 18 to 20 and event 20, 24 and 25 MW that are being looked at,” Dagher said.
When these turbines grew bigger, then the entire supply chain – the cranes to lift them, the ships to move them, and the ports and inland infrastructure that has to handle them – has to increase to support them, he said. “There’s a cascade through the supply chain, that’s causing significant consternations for the industry.”
With the growing sizes comes questions of quality, and the inability to retool the supply chain to drive costs and efficiencies.
There have been calls for the OEMs, or original equipment manufacturers, to hit the pause button on turbine sizes “so that we can industrialize what we have today,” Dagher said.
2024 and Beyond
Meanwhile, in the background looms the U.S. presidential elections in November 2024, and wind energy and other green alternatives are a key rift between the two major parties.
Dagher, though, believes wind will have clear sailing. “Even in the prior administration, wind moved forward very well.” Even conservative and fossil industry-focused Texas has become the leading U.S. state for wind energy. “It’s not really the political climate that drove it; it’s the reality that its cheaper than other options … renewables are becoming more and more competitive with fossil fuels, regardless of where the political climate is.”
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