Scaling up floating offshore wind farm installation: From conventional to modular strategies

This study addresses the challenge of scaling up floating offshore wind (FOW) farms beyond current small-scale installations. It introduces instaSIM®, a discrete-event simulation model validated against data from the Hywind Scotland project, showing high accuracy (less than five days deviation).

The analysis finds that conventional installation methods are not suitable for large farms (over 10–15 turbines), as they exceed one-year timelines and face significant cost increases due to weather-related delays. To overcome this, three modular installation strategies, parallel, consecutive, and hybrid, are evaluated for a 40-turbine, 600-MW project.

All modular strategies reduce installation costs by 54% compared to the conventional baseline. The parallel strategy achieves the greatest time reduction (137 days), while hybrid and consecutive approaches require 500 and 1232 days, respectively. Beyond cost savings, modular approaches enable earlier electricity generation, significantly increasing revenue and accelerating capital expenditure (CAPEX) recovery.

Overall, the study demonstrates that modular installation strategies are more economically and operationally viable for large-scale floating offshore wind deployment.