Wind power

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Expanding on existing expertise and market developments

The utilization of wind power is rapidly growing on an international level. Increasing the investments, research opportunities and demonstration opportunities for wind power will greatly benefit the Norwegian position on a European and global level. Especially offshore wind farms present great potential. To succeed, Norway needs to set ambitious R&D targets to face the global competition.

Offshore wind energy represents a golden opportunity for Norwegian developers and suppliers in the international market. The market is large and growing with major developments in the North-Sea, mainly within UK and Germany waters, but also expanding outside Europe with especially China, Japan and USA having ambitious targets. Norway has a strong standing in this development building on expertise within the energy and petro-maritime industries and with the FMEs NOWITECH and NORCOWE as spearheads for research. Nevertheless, the international competition is strong with ambitious programmes for development. Thus, to progress as a competitive supplier and offshore wind farm developer in the international market, Norway must enhance research and industry incentives, including a strong programme for testing and qualification of new technology. Wind power on land is more mature in terms of market and technology, but still with potential for research, albeit less compared to offshore wind power. t

| Technology Status

On- and offshore wind turbines are today very similar in design, basically all according to the classical horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) concept. Unit sizes are up to 7 MW with rotor diameters approaching 160 m, but also larger units are in development. Wind farms constitute a number of wind turbines grouped together, typically with some 5-10 rotor diameters between each turbine, and connected to the transmission grid with a joint transformer station. Wind farms may range from a few tens of MW onshore to GW sizes offshore. The globally installed wind capacity was 282 GW by end of 2012, of which about 5 GW was offshore. The development is rapid, about 45 GW of new capacity was installed in 2012 [1], and predicted to continue: IEA [2] assumes in their scenario for limiting the global heating to 2 degrees Celsius that wind farms shall provide for about 15% of the global electricity generation by 2050, roughly corresponding to a total of 2000 GW of installed wind power. Large areas with good wind resources offshore, and increasing pressure on land space, indicates that a significant part of this will be offshore, possibly overtaking the land-based development. In Europe alone the goal is 150 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030. [3] Statoil and Statkraft are active as developers in the UK offshore market with Sheringham Shoal (317 MW) in operation, Dudgeon (402 MW) in development and Doggerbank (9-13 GW) in planning.

The installed wind capacity in Norway is 704 MW (2013) giving an annual generation of about 1.5 TWh, all onshore except for the floating wind turbine HyWind (2.3 MW). The possibilities and interest for development of new wind farms are significant; alone on the west-coast of Mid-Norway building permits are granted for installation of 1.7 GW of wind farms. In total the expectations is 7-8 TWh of wind generation in Norway by 2020, all to be

realized as part of the joint Swedish-Norwegian green certificate market, ref. www.vindportalen.no. Likely these will all be onshore wind farms, though the offshore potential is huge. [4, 5, 6], but presently with significant higher cost of energy than land based wind farms. The costs of energy from offshore wind farms vary currently between NOK 90-120 cents/kWh, compared to NOK 5060 cents/kWh on land. [8] Significant cost reductions are however expected. The industry goal is 20-40% reduction by 2020 and 50% reduction in costs of energy from offshore wind farms by 2030. [7]

The industry for wind power on land is dominated by large wind turbine manufacturers such as GE (USA), Vestas (Denmark), Siemens (Denmark/Germany), Enercon (Germany), Suzlon/REpower (India), Gamesa (Spain) and Goldwind (China). Norway has one wind turbine supplier, Blaaster, currently testing their new direct drive 3 MW turbine at Valsneset test station for wind turbines. Other Norwegian companies are involved in planning and resource assessment, site preparations and installation, grid connection and operation and maintenance (O&M), though mainly for the Norwegian market only. For offshore, the wind turbine suppliers play a less dominant role as installation, substructures, grid connection and O&M constitute major parts typically handled by separate companies. In this market, Norwegian suppliers of goods and services have a strong international standing with companies like Fred Olsen, Aibel, Reinertsen, Owec Tower, Olav Olsen, Nexans, Fedem, Fugro OCEANOR, Kongsberg and DNV GL. HyWind, the world’s first floating turbine in full scale was developed by Statoil, and the research centres (FMEs) on offshore wind NOWITECH and NORCOWE deliver research of high international calibre. In total some 150 Norwegian companies are engaged in the offshore wind market. [8]

Challenges

The main challenges can be summarized as to achieve cost reductions, better integration in power system and environment, and development of the supply industry. Development of larger and more robust turbines especially adapted to the offshore environment, new and better substructures and installation methods, more efficient strategies and technologies for O&M and better solutions for grid connection and system integration are significant areas of research. There is also a need for increased knowledge about wind and wave conditions, and better models for wind farm design with reduced uncertainty and high yield.

A main challenge in developing larger turbines is that the tower top weight increases more or less with the cube of the rating, thus innovations are required for larger lightweight designs. Better models, use of new materials, improved blade designs and new generator concepts are key areas of R&D.

Grid connection and power system integration are challenging both on land and offshore. For on land wind farms, it is often so that good wind resources and available land are in proximity to relatively weak electric grids, hence limiting the exploitation of the wind resource. Large offshore wind farms far from shore requires connection by HVDC associated with significant costs and limited experience. On this, there is significant international interest in developing an offshore grid with transnational lines serving both power exchange and connecting offshore wind farms. R&D efforts are prone to provide for large cost savings and reduced risks in grid connection and power system integration.

Operation and maintenance are particularly challenging offshore. More resilient designs with less need for maintenance and repairs, systems for reducing need for access and vessels capable of accessing turbines in rough weather are key areas of R&D.

Development of wind turbine and wind farm control systems is considered a promising area of research. Wind turbine control systems may be developed for better mitigation of loads and reduction in unwanted swings, whereas wind farm control can be made more advanced for optimization of production taking into account wake propagation, loads and grid requirements.

Substructures for offshore wind turbines are available for both bottom-fixed and floating turbines, but only with very limited experience for water depths exceeding 50

meters. There is a need to develop substructures capable of carrying larger turbines, and systems that makes the installation process robust towards weather conditions. The latter may include development of new vessels able to operate in more harsh conditions or it may be new concepts that can be assembled on shore. Concepts that require a minimum of offshore installation works are prone to reduce risks and costs. Marine operations are considered a critical factor with significant potential for improvements through research and lab scale testing.

A major challenge for developing an offshore wind supply industry in Norway is the lack of a home market.

Outlook

Offshore wind stands out to be a market in which Norwegian industry has the potential to develop large supplies that over the next few decades can become comparable to the oil and gas supply industry. In Europe alone expected investments are in the order of NOK 1.000 billion for the construction of offshore wind farms over the next ten years. However, the international competition is strong, and the advantages we have from our petro-maritime experience have limited duration. We therefore need a shift of priorities in our efforts to establish an effective program for the development, testing and demonstration of offshore wind farm technology. This is needed for the development of technology and expertise that can reduce the cost of offshore wind energy and secure future Norwegian knowledge-based deliveries to the international market. There are also opportunities and research challenges related to land-based wind power that should be addressed, albeit the potential and effort proposed is less than for offshore.

R&D recommendations:

• Establish test and demonstration projects on offshore wind energy, both fixed and floating turbines, with a total size of 100 MW or more.

• Reinforce and continue the public support for the FMEs as spearheads for research on offshore wind in the international market.

• Increase public funding for basic research, PhD education, and development of high risk-high gain ideas. policy recommendations:

• Establishment of test and demonstration projects on maritime wind energy, both for fixed and moving turbines, with a total size of 100 MW or more.

• Establish a regulatory framework that makes development of windfarms attractive.