In the last year or so, I have developed SpiderFLOAT (patent pending), an innovative, ultra-compliant, slender floating substructure for offshore wind turbines (see e.g., here).
The goal of this disruptive innovation in Floating Offshore Wind technology is to enable a greater market share of offshore wind energy, ultimately strengthening and diversifying the array of domestic energy sources available to Americans. The U.S. DOE has supported this concept with a Technology Commercialization Fund to bring the SpiderFLOAT to a wave basin testing facility, which will help verify initial assumptions of the hydrodynamic parameters and simulation results. This effort is also generously aided by Equinor, the world’s leading floating offshore wind developer to date.
ARPA-E’s ATLANTIS program has now selected SpiderFLOAT for further R&D to help bring this concept closer to market. SpiderFLOAT promises to reduce floating offshore wind LCOE below 60$/MWh.
My colleagues Senu Sirnivas and Fabian Wendt contributed to the numerical analyses and support of the SpiderFLOAT concept.
We greatly appreciate the U.S. DOE’s Office of Technology Transition and ARPA-E for believing in this new design and helping us promote the technology.
Go SpiderFLOAT, developed in America for America!