It’s incredible to think how much offshore wind has changed since the turn of the century. Back in 2000, 2MW turbines were being installed in water depths of just 15 meters, only a few miles off the coast. Today, 16 years later, a single turbine can produce a higher output than all the turbines combined in earlier wind farms, the blades are at least 4 times longer, the water depth can be over 10 times deeper and the sailing time from the coast can also be 10 times longer. If you’d have told someone working in the industry back then, what they could expect now, they’d have probably laughed! Everything has become either bigger or longer or deeper. To match this impressive development, the industry has sensibly focused on supply chain bottlenecks and improvement areas for cost reduction. Vessels, Ports, Access, Foundations, Turbines, Manpower and Financing are just some of the focus areas the industry has targeted during its remarkable development the last decade. All this has helped push the boundaries further out in the direction of what we believed was the way forward at the start of the millennium.
Going deeper than water depths of 15m or even trying to imagine an 8MW turbine being installed offshore was beyond the imagination of most people when the industry started. Now, the ability to install 80m blades on to rotor hubs well over 100m above in water depths greater than 40m has become a reality, with this work already scheduled for the near future.