Floating Offshore Wind Turbines (FOWT) are getting progressively more attention in the energy industry due to the large availability of offshore areas with associated higher wind energy yield and lower environmental and social acceptability constraints compared to onshore wind farms. Literature highlights the advantage of using so-called Technology Performance Level (TPL) indicator in conjunction with Technology Readiness Level (TRL) indicator to assess promising development paths aimed to deploy a novel technology earlier, with lower cost and less associated risk.
In the presented work, the original TPL assessment methodology developed by Sandia National Laboratories for Wave Energy Converter (WEC) technology has been adapted to deal with floating wind technology, originating a tailored questionnaire to be answered after the identification of possible deployment sites. In adapting the questionnaire, particular focus was put in the sub-system that currently presents the biggest technological challenges, i.e. the floating substructure of the turbine, also in consideration of the large variability of such concepts presently under development.
The questionnaire is composed of various sections, the scores of which are obtained from the answers provided by both the Technology Provider and the Project Developer. In turn, the overall TPL score is obtained from such scores by bottom-up application of a predefined set of formulas.
To cater for the possible presence of unanswered questions (for instance due to lack of information at the time of assessment) the implementation of the present assessment methodology foresees a statistical Monte Carlo approach that still allows to evaluate the overall TPL in terms of the most likely score and the related uncertainty.
The developed TPL methodology has presently been applied twice, to evaluate how a specific concept of turbine floating substructure would score as part of a hypothetical project of a 500 MW floating wind farm in 250–300 m water depth deployed in two potential locations: a site in the Mediterranean Sea and one in the North Sea.
The intended end-users of the TPL assessment methodology are mainly project developers and investors willing to assess and compare the techno-economic performance of different floating wind technologies in given applicative scenarios, but also the technology providers can get useful information from the assessment, since it allows identification of improvement areas of their products.
