Floating systems for offshore wind farms in deeper waters are key to fulfilling Taiwan’s wind energy goals and the government should commit to a plan supporting the new technology, developers and industry insiders said at the Wind Energy Asia forum in Kaohsiung on Thursday.
Floating systems were first developed for the oil and gas industries, and there are many pilot projects for floating offshore wind farm systems around the world, including in Japan and the UK.
However, the cost is still prohibitively high, RWE Renewables Taiwan business development head Chong Yu-foong (張友鴻) said.
Photo: AP
“It is not correct to call it an immature technology, because we already know that it works,” Chong said. “The challenge is to make it commercially viable.”
Experts say that 50m is widely considered to be the deepest at which fixed-bottom wind turbines can be installed, while some think that the envelope can be pushed to 60m, with the costs and complications of installing the turbines increasing with the depth.
Taiwan’s prime shallow-water sites are off the shore of Changhua County in the west, where demand for electricity is high.
“Demand is centered in the northwest of Taiwan,” Chong said.
“The northwest also has the greatest wind yields, but waters there are more than 50m deep,” he added.
Chong estimates that there are only about 10 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind sites around Taiwan that are shallow enough for fixed-bottom installations.
About 5.5GW of that capacity has been allocated to various developers as a part of the government’s “phase 2” offshore wind development plan.
This means that to complete the “phase 3” plan, developers would have no choice but to move to deeper waters.
There might also be “supply-chain opportunities” for domestic manufacturers, as there are currently no dominant established players specializing in floating offshore wind systems, Chong said.
“Traditional electricity cables are hard and stiff, but floating systems require flexible, dynamic cables. This is just one of the new manufacturing opportunities,” he said.
If Taiwan takes advantage by moving first in the Asia-Pacific region, Taiwanese floating system suppliers could have an advantage going forward, he said.
“With the appropriate government support, we could see the formation of a floating wind industrial cluster here in Taiwan,” Chang said. “If that does not happen, the cluster will probably be in Japan.”
Describing floating systems as “feasible and bankable,” Great Circle Wind Associates (大環風能管理服務) managing partner Eddie Yang joined other developers in calling for the government to establish two to three “stepping stone” projects of about 100 megawatts (MW) in size, supported by a feed-in tariff scheme.
“Taiwan does not need a demonstration project, we can go straight to 90MW, try three different floating systems and see what works best,” Yang said.
However, not everybody is expecting floating systems to become a reality any time soon.
Wind industry consultant Manuel Zehr said that he is skeptical that floating systems would become cheap and reliable enough to be in use commercially.
“Maybe in eighty years,” said Zehr, director of international projects with Formosan Business Support Co, recounting watching a streaming demonstration of a floating turbine that toppled in the water.
Gert Eriksen, head engineer of Wind Energy Pro, a staffing and consulting service provider, said that floating systems have pros and cons.
“The advantage is you can build it right in the port — there’s no need for heavy-lift vessels — but the disadvantage is that it is very, very expensive,” Eriksen said.
He said that offshore wind developers have previously taken a chance on new technology.
“It’s just like when we started going to the jacket systems from the monopiles,” Eriksen said. “In the beginning, there was a lot of uncertainty, but now they are the industry standard.”
Wind Energy Asia executive vice president Robert Campbell said that the future is floating systems.
“Two years ago, nobody talked about it,” Campbell added. “Now, everybody is trying to figure out how to do it.”
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