FLOATGEN

The Floatgen project, financed by the European Commission and in which ZABALA participates, demonstrates the feasibility of floating offshore technology in deep waters for its application, for the first time, in maritime areas of southern Europe.

CHALLENGE

The objective of the FLOATGEN project is to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of floating wind turbines, to expand the possibilities for the development of deep water offshore wind farms, which are currently not commercially viable, and thus demonstrate the cost reduction potential of this technology. The project will also evaluate the performance of such a combination of wind turbine and floating structure technology to gain the necessary knowledge to improve performance in future scaled-up projects with this technology.

SOLUTION

IDEOL, leader of the consortium, will design the demonstrator based on its floating technology and supply the 2 MW wind turbine. It will be installed at the SEMREV test site, owned by ECOLE CENTRAL DE NANTES, located 12 nautical miles off the French Atlantic coast. Bouygues Travaux Publics will be responsible for the construction of the floating platform, while the University of Stuttgart will contribute with the load simulations. RSK will analyse the environmental impact and ZABALA will contribute with the financial/administrative management. Fraunhofer-IWES will carry out a comparative analysis between the system proposed by FLOATGEN and other floating solutions.

RESULTS

FLOATGEN will be the first offshore wind turbine in France and the first example of floating offshore wind farms to be installed in the coming years in deep waters of the Atlantic. It will be able to confirm the excellent performance of the floating solution in real conditions and will provide a starting point.