Abstract

Offshore windfarms are moving towards deeper and deeper locations to exploit stronger and more constant winds and decrease their visual impact.

New emerging floating concepts are promising to cover future windfarms lying in very deep locations but in the next decade there will be also a consistent portion of wind farm fields in midwaters, i.e., between 50m and 100m water depth, likely to be built on fixed foundations.

One of the main issues of fixed foundation is that construction and installation costs dramatically rise as water depth increases. Moreover, the introduction of new powerful wind turbines will require stronger and heavier foundations able to bear environmental and operative loading throughout the overall plant lifetime. Innovative and cost-effective new concepts are then required to reduce overall LCOE of future offshore wind farms and meet future market expectations.

A modular approach, consisting of splitting the fixed foundation in two or more parts, is presented in this paper. Such approach has been already used in the past in the traditional Oil & Gas business to overcome feasibility issues in mid to deep waters and, once applied in renewable energies market scenario, looks to be very promising by improving the design and fabrication flexibility as well as widening the fleet of the vessels with the lifting and handling capacity required for their installation.

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