Floating offshore wind awaits big bang to move Scotland into the future, by Jeremy Grant

“Energy is our heritage, but it is also our future,” declared Gillian Owen, Aberdeenshire Council’s leader last week at a reception for an annual floating offshore wind conference in the Granite City.

Fresh from news that GB Energy’s headquarters is to create hundreds of jobs in Aberdeen, there is a sense of guarded optimism about the prospects for offshore wind in the Northeast.

Much is rightly made of offshore wind’s role in enabling the switch from fossil fuels to tackle the climate crisis. But meeting the ambition for floating wind farms – which are tethered to the sea floor by anchors and cables, unlike their fixed-bottom cousins – is a huge challenge.

That’s because it is commercially unproven at scale. The few floating wind farms that exist, off Scotland and Norway, are small and partly designed to test the technology.

The vision for floating wind’s role in the energy mix is Promethean. The UK is the third largest floating wind market after Italy and the US by announced ambition. Scotland accounts for 75% of what’s supposed to be operational in UK waters by 2030. Most of this is to come from the ScotWind project and INTOG, a scheme under which oil rigs are to be decarbonised by switching to wind-generated power from diesel.

Yet rising costs have dogged offshore wind developers globally, casting doubt on the viability of wind farms far out at sea. Some believe that plans may have to be scaled back, or refocused on fixed-bottom where there is a commercial track record and more parts standardisation. At the conference, hosted by Scottish Renewables and RenewableUK, an American-owned company called OSI Renewables demonstrated a scale model of a cheaper crossover between floating and fixed platform for use at the 60-metre depth where floating starts to be viable.

Industry is disappointed that the UK government’s latest subsidy round to incentivise commercialisation last month included only one floating wind project, an INTOG project called Green Volt, Europe's largest floating windfarm, which will be headquartered in Aberdeen. 

Further hurdles are grid upgrades, supply chain gaps, adaptation of port infrastructure and project consent, although John Swinney, Scotland’s First Minister, sought to reassure the conference with repeated mentions of “policy certainty”.

Still, there are signs of incremental progress, if not the big bang needed to de-risk offshore wind and unlock financing and insurance. Work is progressing on adapting the subsea technology used in oil and gas at the Floating Wind Innovation Centre, the world’s first facility for developing floating offshore wind technology and based in the Energy Transition Zone (ETZ), an industrial park next to Port of Aberdeen. Mooreast, a Singaporean company, is working with the ETZ on plans for a factory that would produce the huge anchors and foundations needed to tether an offshore wind platform to the seabed.

There is also ambition. A report by a government-industry floating offshore wind taskforce, unveiled at the conference, says floating turbines could be Britain’s biggest industrial success story by providing a third of the UK’s offshore wind capacity by 2050, creating almost 100,000 jobs – “if the right measures are put in place to enable more projects to go ahead faster”.