Scotland gives the world its first floating wind farm

The Hywind project has five turbines floating 25 kms off coast of Peterhead, near Aberdeen

The world’s first floating offshore wind farm started delivering electricity to the grid in the north of Scotland.

The Hywind project, built by Norwegian oil company Statoil and Masdar Abu Dhabi Future Energy, has five turbines floating 25 kilometres (16 miles) off the coast of Peterhead, near Aberdeen. The project has a capacity of 30 megawatts and cost about 200 million euros ($263 million) to construct.

“This marks an exciting development for renewable energy in Scotland,” said First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. “Hywind will provide clean energy to over twenty thousand homes and will help us meet our ambitious climate change targets.”

Wind turbines have been installed on seabeds since the 1990s. Taking them offshore typically increases wind speeds and reduces complaints from neighbours, but it has also been limited to relatively shallow seas. Floating turbines are expected to open the industry up to new markets like Japan, the US west coast and Mediterranean, where seabeds drop off steeply from the coast.

“Hywind can be used for water depths up to 800 meters, thus opening up areas that so far have been inaccessible for offshore wind,” said Irene Rummelhoff, executive vice president of the New Energy Solutions business area at Statoil.

Some of the energy generated by the turbines in the sea will be stored in batteries. Statoil has installed one of its Batwind lithium devices, which can store 1 megawatt-hour of power. This will help steady the flow of power generated by the wind farm.

The cost of conventional offshore wind farms has been plummeting in recent years. The UK’s latest renewable energy auction saw prices drop to 57.50 euros per megawatt-hour, less than a third the cost of new nuclear  power in the UK.