The infrastructure challenge

Realizing that opportunity, however, will require overcoming several significant challenges:

• Developing multiple foundation assembly and turbine-integration sites with adequate quayside capacity, water depth and unrestricted access to the development areas;
• Constructing substantial new transmission infrastructure to move several gigawatts of power to existing load centers and securing bankable power-purchase arrangements;
• Navigating environmental, tribal, military and other permitting requirements while managing federal policy uncertainty; and
• Establishing a supply chain capable of fabricating, integrating, installing and operating floating wind farms comprising hundreds of large floating structures.

These challenges are surmountable, but they must be addressed early and will require substantial investment before projects become financeable.

Lessons from deepwater oil and gas

Developing a 1-GW-plus floating wind farm has important similarities to developing a large deepwater oil and gas field. Both are capital-intensive, have long cycle times from lease acquisition to first production, and demand sophisticated project and risk management, supply-chain coordination and technical expertise. Both also rely on floating structures (e.g., semisubmersibles, spars and tension-leg platforms [TLPs]), and both must operate reliably for decades in challenging offshore environments.

Over several decades, the offshore oil and gas industry has developed a disciplined stage-gate process covering the complete project life cycle, from lease acquisition through abandonment. Each phase progressively defines and de-risks the project before the next major investment decision.

The industry has also developed contracting strategies, execution models and operating philosophies that make multibillion-dollar investments in remote offshore environments possible. Floating wind should adapt many of these lessons rather than recreate them.

Critical decisions during project selection

The Select phase is particularly important because it is where many of the most consequential decisions are made. For a floating wind development, one is selection of the foundation concept. Semisubmersible, spar and TLP configurations are among the principal candidates for West Coast conditions, but each must be evaluated against the site-specific metocean environment, fabrication and assembly infrastructure, turbine-integration strategy and available installation vessels. A sub-optimal selection can propagate through later project phases, ultimately appearing as additional capital cost, schedule delay or operational constraints, adversely impacting sanctioned performance metrics.

Station keeping provides another example of transferable offshore experience. Spread-moored systems for semisubmersibles and spars and vertically tensioned systems for TLPs are well-established offshore technologies over a wide range of water depths. The underlying technology is not the principal obstacle. The challenge is industrialization: scaling from perhaps 12-16 mooring lines on a conventional offshore platform to 300 or more lines for a 100-turbine floating wind farm while achieving repetitive, low-cost installation and integrity management.

While floating wind projects have yet to reach commercial scale in US waters, decisions made during the next decade on infrastructure, supply chains and project execution will largely determine how quickly the industry can develop along the West Coast.

Floating offshore wind has progressed substantially in the past decade. However, to successfully execute and fully realize the enormous resource potential of industrial scale wind farm projects off the US West Coast in 10 to 15 years, it must lean heavily into the lessons, learnings and capabilities of the floating oil and gas industry on the Gulf Coast.