Simply Blue and Eolus get green light to research gigascale floating wind in Finland

Developers to kick off 2023 with environmental impact assessment for 1-2GW Wellamo project off Pori in Bay of Bothnia

Simply Blue Energy and Eolus have been granted a research permit for a 1-2GW floating wind project in the Finnish part of the Bothnian Sea, a part of the northernmost arm of the Baltic Sea.

The two renewables developers – which last month had formed the joint venture SeaSapphire to develop four gigascale floating wind arrays in the Baltic Sea in both Sweden and Finland – will start environmental impact assessment in January and plan seabed investigations later in 2023.

The Wellamo Floating Wind project is located at some 90 kilometres off the coast southwest of Pori, where developer Hyötytuuli has been operating a 42MW nearshore pilot array since 2017. If built, Wellamo would add up to 10 terawatt hours of green electricity to the Finnish grid annually.

The Nordic country aims to be carbon neutral by 2035 and sees offshore wind as key for achieving this goal. Finland is also speeding up renewables to substitute former Russian energy imports that were curtailed in the wake of the war on Ukraine.

The developers reckon they will need some 100 offshore wind turbines for the array but will determine the final number at a later stage.

Earlier this month, Finnish state-owned forest and seabed management firm Metsähallitus had chosen Swedish utility Vattenfall to build and operate a 1.3GW offshore wind farm off Korsnäs, also in the Bay of Bothnia, at just 400km south of the Arctic Circle.