Floating Wind: Turning Ambition into Action

Offshore wind is experiencing a decade of progress. But with space at a premium and many offshore areas proving too deep for bottom-fixed turbines, the attractiveness of floating wind is growing and looks set to take a sizable piece of the overall offshore wind pie. DNV’s Energy Transition Outlook forecasts that by 2050, 15% of all offshore wind installed capacity will come from floating offshore wind. This means that approximately 300 GW of floating offshore wind will be installed globally in the next 30 years, requiring around 20,000 turbines, each mounted on top of floating units weighing more than 5,000 …

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The Benefit and Urgency of Planned Offshore Transmission

This report first lays out the urgent case for proactively and holistically planning transmission solutions for the nation’s increasingly ambitious offshore wind goals. Section II reviews existing studies that document the benefits of proactive planning and quantifies the economic, environmental, and reliability benefits offered by carefully planned offshore wind transmission solutions. Section III summarizes barriers that currently prevent the realization of these benefits. Section IV recommends specific steps that states, grid operators, the federal administration and key federal agencies, and industry stakeholders need to take to create a pathway for no-regrets grid solutions that allows achieving near- and long-term offshore …

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Streamlining Planning and Permitting to Accelerate Wind and Solar Deployment

This Insights Briefing focuses on one of the most pressing execution challenges to the rapid scale-up of clean electrification – slow planning, permitting, and land acquisition. While this set of challenges affects multiple clean energy technologies, the focus in this report will be on utility-scale solar photovoltaics (PV) (e.g., ~1 MW or above in size) and onshore and offshore wind, as the critical “backbone” zero-carbon generation technologies. After providing context on renewables deployment trends and current challenges, this Insights Briefing will develop an in-depth assessment of major planning and permitting barriers across project stages. It will then provide an overview …

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Wind Energy: Supply Chain Deep Dive Assessment

To inform the DOE team’s supply chain review, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) conducted research and analyses that characterize supply chain strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within the wind industry, including both land-based and offshore wind.The team also conducted interviews with industry stakeholders and subject matter experts. This report documents these findings and provides a foundation for addressing the observed vulnerabilities and enhancing U.S. wind supply chain competitiveness.

Research into the U.S. wind supply chain reveals several vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities manifest differently for offshore and land-based wind given their current domestic supply chain status(i.e., absent or nascent …

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Climate-Tech to Watch: Floating Wind Farms

Floating offshore wind farms should be the next big thing in the wind industry. But catalyzing greater private investment and reducing costs will require large-scale demonstration to increase confidence from investors that the technology works as intended.

A floating wind farm is exactly what it sounds like—an array of wind turbines on floating platforms instead of fixed foundations rooted to the seabed. Each floating platform is tethered to the seabed with mooring lines and anchors that prevent it from drifting off. Floating wind turbines are important because they can be installed in deep waters where much of the world’s wind …

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Offshore Renewables: An Action Agenda for Deployment

Transforming the energy sector requires a shift towards renewable energy sources. The world’s oceans are a source of abundant renewable energy, which can be tapped through offshore wind (with fixed and floating foundations, or airborne), floating solar photovoltaics (PV) and other emerging ocean energy technologies.

The G20 Italian presidency of 2021, acknowledging the importance of offshore renewables in the energy transition, commissioned IRENA to analyze and develop a proposed action agenda to foster offshore renewables deployment globally. Offshore renewables include offshore wind, ocean wave, tidal, thermal and salinity gradient technologies and floating solar PV.

To put the world on a …

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Wind Farm Control: The Route to Bankability

Over the past decade wind farm control has gone from being a research topic to a viable solution and an opportunity for the wider industry to optimize wind farm value and contribute to reducing the levelized cost of energy. DNV believes that successful design and implementation of wind farm control relies on the accuracy of analytical techniques and models, and on their validation against experimental data. DNV has gathered experts in various disciplines to create this position paper, which describes DNV’s position on what is required to make wind farm control technically viable, suitable for project investment and eventually suitable… View Full Resource

Expert elicitation survey predicts 37% to 49% declines in wind energy costs by 2050

Wind energy has experienced accelerated cost reduction over the past five years—far greater than predicted in a 2015 expert elicitation. Here we report results from a new survey on wind costs, compare those with previous results and discuss the accuracy of the earlier predictions. We show that experts in 2020 expect future onshore and offshore wind costs to decline 37–49% by 2050, resulting in costs 50% lower than predicted in 2015. This is due to cost reductions witnessed over the past five years and expected continued advancements. If realized, these costs might allow wind to play a larger role in …

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Navigating the PJM Interconnection Process for Wind and Solar Projects

Over the last two years, the number of renewable projects in the PJM interconnection queue has sky-rocketed, bringing with it a whole new set of challenges for developers. Solar and offshore wind projects will dominate this surge.

Navigating the PJM interconnection process for wind and solar projects presents an overview of the queue process, related industry trends, and some of the emerging issues related to network upgrades and cost exposure for renewable projects. You’ll learn: how the PJM interconnection process uses a sequential cluster-based assessment made up of five major milestones; two recent case studies that illustrate the complexity of …

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Offshore Energy Outlook

Energy produced offshore is a major component of global oil and natural gas supply and
could provide an increasingly important source of renewable electricity. Resources are
enormous, but offshore projects have to prove their worth in a changing market and
policy context, amid a variety of pressures on the world’s oceans. More than a quarter of
today’s oil and gas supply is produced offshore, mostly in the Middle East, the North Sea,
Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caspian Sea. While offshore oil production has been
relatively stable since 2000, natural gas output from offshore fields has risen by …

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