POWER October 2021 - 14

GLOBAL MONITOR
After eight years of successful operation, Equinor then commissioned
the world's first full-scale floating wind farm, the
Hywind Scotland Pilot Park, located about 30 km off the coast
of Aberdeenshire in Scotland. With a rotor diameter of 154
meters and a height of 253 meters, the floating farm generates
enough energy to power roughly 20,000 homes. A unique
feature is that the giant masts and turbines sit in buoyant concrete-and-steel
keels that enable them to stand upright in the
water, similar to a bob float used for fishing.
With an installed capacity of 30 MW, the wind farm comprises
five 6-MW wind turbine generators. These are connected
through a dynamic inter-array cable network before feeding
back into a single 30-km-long dynamic export cable carrying
energy back to land in Peterhead, Scotland.
The cable systems were tested, sealed off, prepared for
pull-in, and delivered in individual lengths, ready for installation.
The Hywind Scotland array covers approximately 4
square kilometers. Water depths vary between 95 meters
and 129 meters, with an average wave height of 1.8 meters,
while the average wind speed is 10 meters per second (m/s).
The success of Hywind Scotland has sparked the deployment
of other floating turbines, with more in the pipeline across
Europe and the world.
Equinor also recently began construction of the world's
first floating wind farm to power offshore oil and gas platforms,
Hywind Tampen. The project will act as a testbed to
explore the integration between gas and wind power generation
systems and further develop floating wind technology. It
will also offset 200,000 metric tons of CO2
and 1,000 metric
tons of NOx
emissions per year.
Technologies are rapidly evolving, and the expanding size
and generation capacity of turbines has played a decisive role
in making these offshore wind farms easier and cheaper to
construct and operate. This, in turn, should unlock their market
potential and help countries around the world realize a costeffective
and carbon-neutral way to solve their growing energy
transition needs.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), by moving
into deeper waters, offshore installations using floating
wind turbines could have the potential to meet the world's
electricity demand several times over by 2040. The Carbon
Trust, a UK-based group formed two decades ago to help businesses
measure their carbon impact, in a recent report said
the global aspiration for floating wind could reach 10.7 GW by
2030, and up to 34 GW by 2035.
The technology costs for floating offshore wind farms are expected
to fall rapidly, enabling wind energy to be harnessed in
areas once thought inaccessible. Ultimately, floating wind farms
are set to become a crucial part of the world's energy mix.
-Maxime Toulotte is head of technical marketing at Nexans, a
global cable and optical fiber company headquartered in
Paris, France. POWER Senior Associate Editor
Darrell Proctor contributed to this report.
POWER Digest
Vattenfall Inaugurates Scandinavia's Largest Offshore Wind
Farm. Vattenfall on Sept. 6 said it inaugurated the 604-MW
Kriegers Flak facility, a new offshore wind farm that is located
in the Baltic Sea, 15 to 40 kilometers (km) off the coast of
Denmark. The wind farm, which covers an area of 132 square
km and involved laying of 170 km of underwater cables, is
Denmark's and Scandinavia's largest offshore wind farm to
date. The Danish parliament gave the project its green light in
2012. Vattenfall put the first foundation in place in May 2020,
and it installed the first of its 72 Siemens Gamesa SG 8.0167
DD wind turbines at the beginning of this year. Siemens
Gamesa said it safely installed all 72 turbines ahead of schedule
despite the pandemic.
Unit 2 of Barakah Nuclear Plant Successfully Starts Up.
Unit 2 at the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant in the Al Dhafra Region
of Abu Dhabi Emirate, United Arab Emirates (UAE), successfully
started up on Aug. 27, five months after the nuclear
plant's first unit began commercial operations, said its owner
Emirates Nuclear Energy Corp. (ENEC). Nawah Energy Co.,
a nuclear operations and maintenance joint venture between
ENEC and the Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO), lauded
the achievement as indicative of " significant progress " to bring
the four units at the plant online. " This key milestone marks the
point at which the Barakah Plant has become the region's first
multi-unit operating plant, further powering the nation's economic
growth with more clean, reliable and abundant electricity, " the
company said. When fully operational, the four units of the plant
will have a total capacity of 5.6 GW.
TNB Developing 300-MW Hydropower Plant in Malaysia.
Malaysian utility Tenaga Nasional Bhd's (TNB's) wholly-owned
subsidiary, TNB Power Generation Sdn Bhd, has received
notification from the nation's Ministry of Energy and Natural
Resources to develop a 300-MW hydroelectric power plant in
Kelantan. In a filing on Sept. 7, the utility said the project will be
built by a new wholly-owned subsidiary, TNBPG Hydro Nenggiri
Sdn Bhd. TNB estimated the project will take five years to
complete. Its expected commercial operation date is June 1,
14
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POWER October 2021

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