Wind | USA
Flowin prize
The nine winners of Phase One, which focused on determining critical manufacturing and supply chain challenges to the commercialization of floating turbine technology, are the following:
- Aikido Technologies (San Francisco, California): The Aikido design is a steel semi-submersible floating platform made of steel tubes that can be manufactured at tower facilities. The platform design offers a streamlined installation process because it can be transported in a unique, horizontal configuration and requires no welding during the final assembly process.
- Beridi USA (Spanish Fork, Utah): Beridi’s Triwind is a concrete-based floating platform that uses damping pools and buoyancy chambers to provide superior stability, limiting fatigue loading. The platform can be mass-manufactured at existing sea ports to provide cost savings.
- FloatHOME (Emeryville, California): FloatHOME’s triangular platform, WindFloat®, now in its fourth generation, provides deep-water stability through unique design features, including a damping system to absorb wave excitation movement. This platform has been fully modularized to enable differing execution plan options, allowing for streamlined manufacturing and adaptable installation.
- OCG-Wind Full Cycle (Oakland, California): By prefabricating necessary parts, OCG-Wind Full Cycle can be quickly assembled near the site of an offshore wind farm. The light-weight four-column semi-submersible floating platform design uses simple, slender components engineered for any wind turbine, making it customizable and ready for large-scale deployment.
- PelaStar (Seattle, Washington): PelaStar’s floating platform is a light-weight tension leg-platform design that minimizes environmental impacts while maintaining cost savings as well as manufacturing and installation flexibility.
- Technip Energies (Houston, Texas): Technip Energies’ INO15 design is a semi-submersible, three-column floating platform. This design can be assembled at ports at low cost and is robust enough to withstand harsh operating environments.
- Tetra Triple-One (Boston, Massachusetts): The Tetra Triple-One floating platform uses a building-block arrangement, which involves fully producing the parts needed in an industrialized manufacturing environment and then transporting them to the assembly site. This makes port-side construction possible for a range of platform configurations, turbine sizes, and site conditions.
- VolturnUS+ Domestically Produced Concrete Hull (Orono, Maine): This team focused on a simplified geometry for their concrete floating platform design, VolturnUS+. With a smaller hull compared to traditional semisubmersibles, the design streamlines construction and deployment processes and reduces costs.
- WHEEL U.S. (Coral Gables, Florida): Incorporating tanks for buoyancy and balance, the ultra-stable WHEEL floating platform design can temporarily act as a barge platform, allowing it to be assembled with the wind turbine near shore and towed to sea. It is compact in size to reduce both costs and carbon footprint.
