DOE earmarks $28 million for floating offshore wind turbine R&D

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.

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.

6 March 2019