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30 Apr 2019
Spanish engineering consultancy Saitec Offshore has secured almost €2m from the European Commission (EC) to build a part-scale version of an innovative concrete floating wind turbine design that promises to have a “levelized cost of energy like onshore wind” when built at its full 10MW-plus size
The EC funding, awarded under the Horizon 2020 scheme, will be put towards building a deploying a 1:6 prototype of its SATH (Swinging Around Twin Hull) design for a 24-month offshore testing programme to de-risk 2MW demonstrator, known as DemoSATH, in Q3 2020. “Through this project we want to de-risk the DemoSATH demonstrator and get a unit in the water, test assemblies and various concrete mixtures [for the hull] but also to accelerate the commercialization process of the 10MW-plus model, as a way of tackling the past and the future at the same time”, Saitec chief technology officer David Carrascosa tells Recharge. “We are analyzing three potential sites [for the part-scale SATH] at the moment”, he adds. “We expect to make a decision [by June] for this stepping stone”. The flagship is slated to be commissioned in October, with Saitec currently in discussions with several turbine OEMs, though it is not yet disclosing a preferred supplier. “This [EC] funding, of course, has an impact on our commercial activity we are involved in,” says Carrascosa, pointing to the company´s current tendering to deliver SATH foundations for 12MW turbines “on several sites in Europe and Asia”. The SATH design is based on a joined pair of cylindrical prestressed concrete hulls anchored to the seabed via a single-point mooring system that allows the unit to swing like a weathervane to face the wind. The concept has previously been put through an extensive part-scale testing campaign in wave tanks at the University of Cantabria´s Instituto de Hidráulica Ambiental.
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