The photo is sourced from engineersireland.ie
The windfarm is based on a floating platform holding 14 vertical axes with 9 minor wind turbines fixed on each of them. The unit will be assembled on-shore and then taken into the open sea, where it will float with the help of the anchored mooring system traditionally used on the vessels as floating production, storage and offloading oil system (FPSO). Due to the small size of the turbines, the wind farm will be capable of generating energy subject to the wind velocity exceeding 11-12 metres per second, which may be dangerous for traditional big wind turbines. At the same time, big aggregated scope of the blades allows for increasing the generating performance: for example, five wind farms will be able to generate the same amount of energy as 25 traditional offshore wind turbines with 375 MW total capacity.
Subject to successful passing from the prototype to commercial analogue, the Wind Catching Systems innovation will be an addition to the technologies aimed at assuring the use of wind turbines in the open sea. Previously, another company (World Wide Wind) proposed its own solution: a wind turbine with a vertical axis, where the upper turbine is connected with a rotor placed at the foundation of the unit, and the bottom turbine – with a stator of the wind turbine. This design provides for a low-level centre of gravity, hence –for the possibility of keeping afloat given the 60° inclination tilt. An alternative solution was proposed by T-Omega by creating a prototype of the wind unit looking like a pyramid held on the water surface due to the square-shaped foundation.
So far, the open-sea wind turbines are much less common versus the off-shore ones: according to IRENA (the International Renewable Energy Agency), the aggregated capacity of the operating open-sea units was 56 GW by the end of 2021, while as the capacity of the off-shore units – 524 GW.
