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ELECTRIFYING THE FUTURE
Future developments in substructure design are closely correlated to the development in wind turbine design. The effect on the substructure design from increasing turbine sizes vary by concepts and consequently also the cost developments from these changes.
future solution that has been looked into is to connect the floating wind turbines to buoyancy elements that are connected to the seabed, as illustrated in Figure 9. This is however considered a solution for a more distant future, most likely beyond 2040.
Introduction of new materials like polyester, graphene, and carbon fibres for mooring lines and tendon systems are likely to be used more in future applications. With larger arrays of turbines the potential for sharing anchor points will become an attractive mooring solution. Costs could potentially be significantly reduced from limiting the number of anchor points. Instead of having three (or more) anchors per turbine a shared anchor point would reduce the amount of anchors to one or two per turbine. However, detailed engineering assessments are required as the load pattern will change drastically. In the longer perspective an array where up to six turbines could share an anchor point could also be a solution, reducing the number of anchors further. Going into increasingly deeper waters, a
Operation and maintenance There are several factors that will drive down the costs of operations and maintenance. First of all the increased size of turbines will reduce the amount of units per installed MW, so going from the current 6-7 MW size to 15 MW turbines would halve the amount of turbines in a field of similar capacity. Furthermore, introduction of technology with fewer rotating parts and optimised blades built with new materials and improved control system algorithms have the potential to further reduce need and associated costs for operation and maintenance (O&M).
Figure 9. Ultra-deep water mooring solutions
Improved accessibility to the turbine structures, e.g. through development of less weather sensitive service vessels and efficient access systems such as