Equinor – one of the largest oil companies in the world – has just opened an 11-turbine floating wind farm off the west coast of Norway. It is the largest in the world, and the company has plans to pursue a similar system in Australia.
Unfortunately, the Hywind Tampen farm in Norway is not providing clean energy to homes or cars, instead it’s powering the extraction of more fossil fuels from nearby offshore oil and gas platforms.
The farm was opened to much fanfare – with the Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and the Australian Ambassador to Norway in attendance.
“Hywind Tampen is expected to reduce CO2 emissions with 200,000 tonnes annually from key oil and gas producers in the North Sea,” says Kjetil Hove, Equinor’s executive vice president for the Norwegian continental shelf.
“It is a bold investment in a pioneering project from the Gullfaks and Snorre partnerships and Enova.”
The Hywind Tampen wind farm has a system capacity of 88 MW and is located about 140 kilometres from shore. The system is expected to cover 35% of the annual electricity needs for five of Equinor’s platforms on oil and gas fields.
The 11 turbines are in an area with a water depth of between 260 and 300 metres.
Floating turbines are a much more experimental way of building offshore wind farms and are designed to be used in deeper waters where bottom mounted turbines are not possible. Currently there’s a total of 64 GW (that’s 64,000 MW) of offshore wind, only around 200 MW of that is made up of floating wind farms.
However, floating wind farms are particularly sought after in areas like California and New South Wales, as both of these states have a steep drop-off of the continental shelf, and traditional offshore wind is not an option.
“As the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm, Hywind Tampen is making a significant contribution to further developing the technology at scale and reducing the future cost of floating offshore wind in a growing global market, including Australia,” says Thomas Hansen, Equinor’s senior director for offshore wind in Australia.
“Hywind Tampen was completed in five years, with 60 percent of the contract values in the project awarded to Norwegian suppliers.
“Equinor is bringing this experience to Australia, as we mature floating offshore wind projects in NSW with our local partner.”
Its partner in NSW is OceanEx, and they have proposed a 2GW project off the coast of Newcastle. Other floating wind proposals for the newly created and pending offshore wind zones in NSW include Energy Estate (1.7GW), French nuclear giant EDF, and BlueFloat Energy.
Although Hywind Tampen is expected to reduce CO2 emissions from these oil and gas platforms by 200,000 tonnes a year, climate campaigners have argued that there’s no longer a place for fossil fuels.
A report by Greenpeace published this month showed that Equinor invests just 3 percent of it’s budget in low carbon activities like solar, wind or hydro power.
