Offshore Wind and Hydrogen

Innovation
Last week I shared knowledge of the floating wind and
hydrogen sector with another cohort from around the
world for World Hydrogen Leaders.

There's a lot happening in the sector, and I thought,

the community might welcome a brief snapshot of
some of the turbines which are starting to appear.

One ‘world first’ is actually a retrofitted hydrogen

installation on a special platform attached to the fixed
foundation base of an 8.8 megawatt operational
turbine off the coast of Aberdeen.
The demonstrator is in planning and, if successful,
integrated with an existing machine, presumably
geared for electrical generation can be switched to
make hydrogen molecules rather than electrons.

Aberdeen is high in the pantheon for floating offshore

wind, hosting the nearby Hywind floating offshore
wind farm boasting remarkable capacity factors.
The molecule is piped ship to shore and could
represent something of a game changer is all very well
to talk about innovation, and indeed I do. But often the
bigger economic prize can be retro fitting.

The second turbine is dolphyn

I've shared with you several times and which to some
extent was the front runner for many years with big
aspirations on firstly the ScotWind more recently the
Celtic Sea leasing rounds

Dolphyn comes with big ambitions, but we wait to see

how it performs in practice in in recent months.

A fast moving and agile Lhyfe turbine from Franc has

stolen some of the limelight.
This week Lhyfe linked up with gas specialists Centrica
to provide a demonstration off the east coast of
England off Easington of the East coast.
This location is crucial in the UK gas grid network and
part of the much bigger East of England hydrogen
aspirations.
Seabed conditions on the east coast have led to fixed
turbines being favoured with gravelly sand enabling a
big build out and Grimsby is one of the largest
operations and maintenance centres on the planet.

It'll be interesting to see how Lhyfe performs. The large

orange floating structure is the desalinators for sea
water.
We wait to see whether a true end to end solution for
the brine by product emerges and perhaps whether
Project sHYp - with which I assisted a few years ago -
can help.

Others, as we see from this line diagram are also

working on various concepts:

One concept in development, but perhaps showing a

future trajectory of floating wind and hydrogen in
recent days has been a big lobby from the port sector
wanting further investment.

The final image below is noteworthy in that if this

concept was to get traction, it would especially if linked
with energy islands, it may undermine that argument
because if this concept moves to reality in ‘Island
mode; to export the hydrogen directly from the turbine
to the vessel,

It's a vibrant sector and one taking me around the

world. I’ll also be updating stakeholders at the World
Hydrogen Congress this autumn and will keep you up
update at: https://bit.ly/3hbRE4A
Floating Wind and Hydrogen