https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/arpa-e-commits-28-million-to-develop-advanced-floating-offshore-wind-turbin
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ARPA-E Commits $28 Million to Develop Advanced Floating Offshore Wind
Turbines
The Energy Department wants to “develop new and potentially disruptive
innovations” in floating offshore wind turbine technology.
Justin Gerdes February 25, 2019
The U.S. Department of Energy’s innovation arm wants to disrupt floating
offshore wind turbine technology.
On February 1, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)
announced it was making available $28 million in funding for research
projects to develop new technologies for floating offshore wind turbines.
The funding opportunity falls under a new ARPA-E program called ATLANTIS
(Aerodynamic Turbines, Lighter and Afloat, with Nautical Technologies
and Integrated Servo-control).
“We are trying to find economically attractive solutions for floating
offshore wind turbines,” Mario Garcia-Sanz, the ATLANTIS program
director, told Greentech Media in an interview.
“The current state of the art for FOWT [floating offshore wind turbines]
is too massive and expensive for practical deployment. ATLANTIS seeks to
design radically new FOWTs,” the ATLANTIS team wrote in a program briefing.
According to ARPA-E, nearly 60 percent of the United States’ accessible
offshore wind resource, estimated at 25 quads annually, is found in
waters more than 200 feet deep — beyond the depth at which
fixed-foundation turbines are economical.
Last October, GTM reported on projects under development in Portugal and
Norway that had tipped the floating offshore wind market closer to
commercialization in Europe.
Efforts to deploy floating turbines in the United States, where the
technology will be necessary to access strong winds found in deep waters
offshore the West Coast, lag behind those in Europe.
Nevertheless, there is activity underway in the United States.
Last April, the Redwood Coast Energy Authority selected a consortium to
build an floating offshore wind farm as large as 150 megawatts off the
coast of Humboldt County, California. The Castle Wind project proposed
for waters in Morro Bay, off California’s Central Coast, would include
100 floating turbines with a total generating capacity of 1,000 megawatts.
Time for an R&D push
An R&D push led by ARPA-E could help researchers and project developers
in the United States not only close the gap with competitors in Europe
(some of which, like the Germany utility EnBW, are looking to
collaborate on floating offshore projects in U.S.), but also drive down
costs.
“Funding a serious, near-term R&D effort would help accelerate cost
reductions and make the technology feasible on a much larger scale
before the end of the decade,” Anthony Logan, a North America wind
energy analyst with Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, said last month
during a roundtable discussion on the Green New Deal convened by GTM.
Logan outlined some of the advantages floating projects have over
fixed-foundation turbine projects.
“A large, multi-gigawatt build-out of floating [turbines] would provide
not only higher capacity factors by opening up sites with higher wind
speeds in deep water but also mitigate the lack of geographic diversity
that will start to hamper the tightly clustered fixed-bottom offshore
wind farm plans on the Atlantic Coast,” he said.
“There’s a question of quayside space availability, but on the
surface, floating wind’s ability to build the entire unit in port and
tow it out to sea would go a long way to mitigating the need to dance
around Jones Act restrictions on installation vessels," Logan added.
Using control co-design to solve problems
In its guidance to research teams interested in applying for ATLANTIS
program funding, ARPA-E encouraged prospective applicants to adopt
“control co-design” approaches in their work.
Control co-design brings together interdisciplinary teams of engineers
and scientists from the start in the hope that such cross-pollinating
collaboration will spur creative thinking.
“The control co-design approach is completely different. You invite all
the engineers to work together in a concurrent way to have a new design,
a new solution,” said Garcia-Sanz.
Assemble a multi-disciplinary team at the outset, he added, and “you can
end up designing the system completely differently.”
Garcia-Sanz said the ATLANTIS program has three research goals: 1)
develop “radical” new floating offshore wind turbine designs that
maximize the rotor-area-to-weight ratio while maintaining or increasing
turbine generation efficiency; 2) build a new generation of computer
tools to help simulate and calculate the effectiveness of the new
designs; and 3) collect real-world data from existing floating offshore
wind turbines to validate new designs.
According to Garcia-Sanz, the current $28 million funding opportunity is
the first phase of what the ATLANTIS team hopes is a two-phase program.
Phase 1 will run for two years. Applicants have until March 18 to submit
concept papers outlining their research proposals.
Funding announcements are expected by the end of 2019.
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