Welcome to the Hydrofiles, the HR Wallingford Podcast. I'm Sally Jackson. And today I'm joined by Mike Case, who is an expert here in clean energy markets and technology. And we're going to be discussing the future of energy, and what that means for water. Hi, Mike.
Hi, Sally.
Let's start off with a topic that we have been working on for a long time, which is floating wind. So, how are we going to develop the floating wind market? Particularly in the UK, I would say, and what does the future look like for that?
Well, it's it's a really exciting sector. At the moment, in the UK, we've got world leaders in fixed bottom offshore wind and, partly because the seabed is becoming so congested, the kind of the continental shelf is becoming very congested by competing uses from shipping, from fishing, from military, from from a number of different uses, developers are looking further offshore into deeper waters to develop offshore wind. And the other advantage of going into the deeper waters is the wind
tends to be cleaner. So you get a higher capacity factor. So you get more bang for your buck, basically, you get more energy for the same capacity installed further offshore, then you will do further further inshore because there tends to be the wind tends to be cleaner and less turbulent. And you also get higher wind speeds as well.
So, expanding into floating offshore wind, could this be something that changes the UK's energy market completely?
Well, I think it's another string to our bow on top of onshore wind, and obviously the huge growth in fixed bottom offshore wind, we've currently got about 14 gigawatts of fixed bottom offshore wind installed. So we're kind of global leaders in that. But we've also on top of that we've leased, just to put it in context, so the 14 gigawatts is what's been built
over the last 20 years. And we've currently got seabed leases in Scotland and and currently, it's just been issued for the Celtic Sea, that will add up to about 25 gigawatts
For fixed bottom?
No. for floating offshore wind. That's just for floating offshore wind. So we're looking at a huge increase in capacity for floating offshore wind on top of the continuing expansion of fixed bottom offshore wind. And as far as I understand it, it's not just a huge expansion in capacity, but also a huge expansion in turbine technology. Can you tell us a
bit about that? Yeah, so the turbine, the actual turbines themselves will probably remain the same as the fixed bottom offshore wind, but of course, they're getting much larger. So we're now into the realms of 15 gigawatt turbines, which are being built out, and people are talking about 20 gigawatt turbines being built. So, the turbines themselves will largely be the same as they used for fixed bottom offshore wind. But the technology for the floating offshore wind is the floaters
themselves. So it's the it's the actual the platform that the turbines sit on - the floaters - but also the mooring systems and the cabling systems to it to enable that to fix the the seabed, and transport the electricity to shore. So that's where the technology is developing.
So before we move on to the actual technology of the floaters, just going back to those turbines sizes. So you've explained there might be 50 megawatts, or 20 megawatts? What does that look like? In reality, how big is a turbine?
You're talking of a blade length of 100 meters, so a single blade, so if you imagine you've got three blades, so the single blade will be about 100 meters, maybe slightly over 100 meters. The total sort of height of the turbines will be 200 to
250 meters tall. And then on top of that, you've got the height of the floater themselves, and they're generally about, for a kind of a standard... I say standard, there isn't a standard unit, but a fairly standard semi-submersible unit, you're talking about 40 meters tall.
So that's actually enormous.
These are these are massive marine assets. The floaters themselves, they're more akin, if you imagine the size of an oil platform, they're similar in scale through of kind of a tripod shaped semi submersible, you're looking at dimensions of, lengths of around 100 meters, 90 to 100 meters, in each direction, and then total height of about 40 meters.
And just to paint the picture of what might this might look like in the sea, so I'm assuming there won't just be one of those, there'll be a lot of those in one place. And how many are we talking about?
Yeah, so for the larger sort of multi gigawatt scale projects that are looking at you could be looking at over 100 units.
And that would help take up how much space in the sea?
Square kilometers you're talking so massive areas. And that's where that's where this was some of the logistical challenges come in because many of the ports just aren't you know, our ports tend to be quite small.
So what would these ports have been used for before? Would they be fishing ports? Is it because a lot of wind is in Scotland, you know, that kind of area so they would have been used for other purposes, these ports?
Yeah, there's there's a few ports which are no,inally quite suitable because they've previously been used for oil and gas platforms. But oil and gas platforms tend to be sort of they're very high value and low number. So you're talking one unit, maybe two units, whereas this is... to build one of these gigawatt scale wind farms, you need to industrialize the assembly of the floaters themselves. So it's very much more of a kind of a factory process really, that you have to
do. So that's the big difference between the oil and gas sector in oil and gas market and the offshore wind market. It's about scale, and then industrialisation.
What does that industrialisation look like? Where are these things built? How do they get out to sea?
On a ship on a barge and you can ship them round. Whereas these are so huge, you can't really do that, or you can do it in parts and then ship them round. But then you still have to have a port where you can assemble them locally. So there's the assembly of the floaters. And then there's what's called the integration. So then you got the floating assembly, you then have to launch them into the water. And then you have to assemble or integrate the turbine, onto the
floater. And then you have to move that out to sea, either to a holding area, before it gets taken out to the main site or straight out to the site.
So there's two things that are springing to mind from that description is one is how many ports are ready for this? Are there ports that are big enough to do this?
There is no single port, which is big enough to have that to handle the numbers that are going to be required. As I said, for Scotland, and the INTOG leasing grounds, we're talking with nearly 20 gigawatts. So that's hundreds of units.
So ports need to find investment to expand and create the space and the facilities to do that?
Yeah, they need they need the space to expand, they need the land area to be able to put the assembly to assemble the units, and also the ability to launch. They also need heavy wharfs to handle the crane edge. And so on. So there's a lot of infrastructure needs to be done before we can go to these gigawatt scale projects
And imagine the operations are at a completely different level. So they what will be used to?
Yeah, so this is a new completely new. So, for fixed bottom offshore wind most of the assembly has gone offshore. So the turbines, and the turbine foundations, will come most often from offshore, they might come from the Netherlands say where they where they build a lot of the foundations. They will come by ship. They might be stored onshore before being shipped up, a lot of the time, they'll go straight out to the site, they'll be installed, and then the turbine towers will come
out. And then on another ship, there'll be installed and it's all done offshore. So not much of it, of the fabrication, actually happens on shore at the port side. And that's a big difference with floating offshore wind is that it will have to be done at the port. A lot more will have to be done at the port side.
And how have we been helping our clients in this industrialisation process?
So yeah, with a company called Offshore Solutions Group, we've initiated a temporary storage JIP - Joint Industry Partnership - to look at this issue of what you do with the floaters prior to assembly. Well from assembly prior to turbine integration, and then from turbine integration to the site. Because in order to produce the number of floaters that you need, you're going to have to manufacture all year round basically. So you're going to have to have manufacturing and
assembly all year round. So once those floaters are assembled, you're going to have to launch them. And then what do you do with them, because there's they're massive, as I mentioned before, these are very large marine assets. Where you put them while they're waiting for the turbine integration? And then once the turbine's integrated, you've probably got quite a small amount of time before you can get that to site.
And it might be you can't really store them for a long time with the turbine integrated before getting to site. So from our calculations and the work we've been doing on the JIP, we've realised that it's pretty much impossible to build one of these gigawatt--scale projects without having wet storage of between 20
and 30 units. And that in turn, covers a huge area, because most ports can maybe, even the larger ports in Scotland, which have previously dealt with oil and gas, they can probably only handle maybe four or five units in terms of storage, because you still have to have space around the units to be able to access them, and for safety and so on. So you're talking about areas of kilometer square, so maybe 10 by five kilometers, you know, in order to be able to handle this number of units.
So what kind of partners have been getting involved with this JIP?
So the JIP, we've had very good take up actually, from developers because obviously for the developers, the main challenge they're grappling with at the moment is the logistics of how you build and deliver these things. And a lot of them have got targets of installation by 2030, which is a real challenge. The port authorities, they're also on board, but we've also got the Crown Estate on board because of the Crown Estate, they lease the seabed.
So they have a commercial interest because, you know, we'll have to lease the sea bed area in order to store the turbines. So they have a commercial interest, but also they have a commercial interest as it's a real enabler for these big gigawatt scale projects. Without the temporary wet storage, it really constrains your ability to build out these gigawatt scale projects.
And is the JIP identifying areas where there's wet storage could be, or is it just identifying the capacity needed?
It's all of the above. So it's looking at the capacity going through from basics, from looking at the assembly, through to what's available in the port areas, through to looking at areas,
identifying areas. So a mapping exercise, if you like identifying areas, which are suitable, which are within the right towing time, and have the right metocean conditions, because they have to be quite sheltered locations for storage, through to actually looking at developing those sites and getting the consents for those sites, and owning and operating them moving forward.
Fascinating. I appreciate we're probably running a bit short on time. But there's I mean, there's so much more we could talk about in terms of what ports might need to do to scale up for floating offshore wind in terms of what they need to do, technically, maybe you can just give us a whistlestop tour of the kind of the things that ports need to be thinking about in terms of operations in terms of quay sizes, etc.
So HR Wallingford work we are we're specialists in looking at how you move things around ports. So navigation. We have the UK ship simulation center here on site. We're specialists, we've worked for decades in developing ports, looking at maneuvering large ships, and large objects around ports, in and around ports. And that links very closely with the physical modeling work we do on
ports. That's one of the one of the big areas we can assist with this is that logistics piece really looking at how you maneuver these objects in and around the ports, how you train the pilots, maneuver them, the tug operators and so on.
So absolutely fascinating stuff. And it'll be interesting to see how it develops over the next few years in the UK and around the world. But thanks so much for coming to talk to us about this. And we look forward to talk to you, again, because we're going to continue the series on the future of energy with some other topics that we'll be talking about. carbon capture and storage, we're talking about solar, which seems counterintuitive when you're talking about water, but we will
get into that. And we're also going to be delving into the future of nuclear which might seem quite settled but actually has a quite an exciting future ahead. So we'll look forward to seeing you again to have chat about those soon.
Okay, very much. Thank you.