Fred Olsen launches ‘innovation firm’ to gasoline floating wind market industrialisation

Norwegian maritime industrial large Fred Olsen has launched a brand new firm, Fred Olsen 1848, to fast-track a spread of ingenious offshore renewable power applied sciences to market, together with a modular floating wind idea dubbed ‘Brunel’, Recharge can reveal.

The “innovation firm”, named after the yr wherein its Oslo-headquartered guardian began up its delivery enterprise, has six new applied sciences it goals to commercialise, with the primary three devoted to floating wind farm development and operation.

“Within the varied Fred Olsen firms we now have constructed on our expertise in renewables and have been working for a very long time and on totally different improvements, [toward] fixing market challenges, and particularly in floating wind and photo voltaic, [which] are successfully new industries,” Sofie Olsen Jebsen, CEO of Fred Olsen 1848 mentioned, talking completely with Recharge earlier than the corporate’s formal launch.

“We imagine what’s required is completely new considering on options… to get the industries rolling into actual industrialisation and get the tempo of manufacturing you want for gigawatt-scale wind farms.

“Bringing these superior – very totally different – applied sciences into one firm will permit us to streamline the method of getting them into the market.”

Carolyn Heeps, Fred Olsen Renewables’ head of offshore wind, provides: “From the developer aspect as nicely, we will really draw upon our revolutionary industrial historical past… and assist convey ahead the options that we want for the applied sciences of tomorrow however delivered ‘now’.”

Jebsen continues: “We have now been creating these applied sciences for a while and we imagine they’re solidly based… to be amongst ‘the’ options for the issues we face in the present day [in terms of the need to speed up the energy transition to slow climate change].

“For this reason we’re forming this new firm, to have extra concentrate on these patent pending applied sciences, to convey them to commercialisation sooner.”

First out of harbour is Fred Olsen 1848’s ‘cell port resolution’, an idea that marries a jack-up set up vessel, a barge and feeder vessels to create an offshore facility in a sheltered space with mooring factors the place the turbine and basis for floating wind models will be built-in quickly for tow-out to a undertaking web site – with out taking over beneficial quayside area alongside a rustic’s coastlines.

As Heeps notes, it’s “an answer that has come about because of the applied sciences we have already got ‘able to go’ now, with the intention to do one thing revolutionary”. Devising new expertise utility aided by the “developer mindset”, she says, has led to options such because the MPS that dovetail current applied sciences “into a unique configuration to a clear up a big downside [in this case, the lack of port space to manufacture and deploy giga-scale floating wind farms].

“Innovation isn’t at all times about creating one thing ‘model new’,” Heeps says.

The MPS has been woven into Fred Olsen Renewables joint bid with utility Vattenfall for Scotland’s upcoming ScotWind offshore wind public sale, based mostly on a sheltered location in Scapa Circulation within the Orkney Islands as a part of the companions’ proposed growth undertaking.

The Brunel floating wind basis, a modular metal semisubmersible, is one other “very solution-minded” innovation, says Jebsen, that weds new engineering intelligence and established industrial competency.

“This [design] is about making an attempt to resolve the serial manufacturing downside you will have in floating wind. There are various visions about gigawatt-scale floating wind farms, however with the prevailing basis ideas which are on the market it’s going to take years to construct out one giant floating wind farm.

“[It is] an answer appropriate to automated manufacturing however that can also be constructed upon the prevailing world provide chain for metal tubulars – for monopiles and towers, as an example – that you would be able to faucet proper into for fast undertaking scale and decrease value manufacturing,” says Jebsen.

The design, original to be “match for the subsequent era of wind generators”, is at present within the idea certification part and is predicted to substantiate itself to be “as superior on a TRL [technical readiness level] as many designs on the market” when it’s formally unveiled in a brief time frame.

The third expertise that may type a part of Fred Olsen 1848’s advance guard as the brand new firm emerges into the market, is a crane resolution for floating wind farm upkeep and operations that will get round the necessity to tow-in models to shore for restore when referred to as for or if main parts have to be swapped out.

The brand new firm and its first suite of revolutionary applied sciences, says Jebsen, “all replicate the spirit of innovation and fixing challenges that has lengthy been a part of who we’re [in the Fred. Olsen related companies] and makes us work nicely collectively”.

“The custom for innovation stems from when the ship-owning enterprise commenced in 1848. From [that year], the Fred Olsen group of firms has constantly contributed to main technological shifts, from crusing ships, to steam-driven vessels, to grease tankers, floating manufacturing and drilling rigs, and now again to wind once more – on land, offshore and floating,” she says.

“We have now lots of people within the Fred Olsen associated firms which are genuinely really feel strongly about bringing renewables ahead and wish to contribute to serving to to create a greener world. This new firm is impressed by that.”