Most of the world’s wind is over deep water. Floating machines can harvest it.
by William Booth,
The Norwegian prime minister and the country’s crown prince were sweating like everyone else, zipped into their North Sea survival suits as they boarded the helicopters to take us out to see the future. The pair, accompanied by press, were here for the official opening of the world’s largest floating offshore wind power project. The word doing the hard work in that sentence is “floating.” Unlike 99 percent of the world’s offshore wind turbines, which are fixed directly to the sea floor in relatively shallow depths, these next-generation machines can be deployed in very deep water, in the outer reaches of ocean space, where they can harvest more powerful, consistent wind. Far offshore, they might also avoid opposition from shoreside communities, who don’t want green energy to spoil the view. The question of how to make the whales, fishing fleets and cargo freighters happy is ongoing. About 90 miles off the coast, in one of the windiest places on Earth, the helicopters took a slow loop past Norway’s newest wind farm, dubbed Hywind Tampen, built by state-owned energy giant Equinor. The machines, from afar, look like pinwheels. But up close, they’re enormous: each almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower, above and below the waterline, and weighing 12,000 tons, equal to 60 Boeing 747s. They are held in place by some of the heftiest chains ever crafted, attached to the sea floor by “suction anchors” that burrow into the sand — exhaling and inhaling air — like something out of a sci-fi novel.
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