During the FOWT event in Marseille, BW Ideol, one of the global leaders in the sector, unveiled its brand-new market approach combining standardization and mass production to a selected panel of utilities and partners.
With over 22 GW already awarded in Scotland, around 8 GW in the USA, and several GW currently being awarded or in the tendering phase elsewhere in the world, floating wind is now entering an industrialization phase.
With the aim of accompanying and driving this evolution, BW Ideol now offers a standardized floating foundation product—based on the Damping Pool® solution in operation since 2018 in France and Japan.
This universal floating foundation is optimized for all metocean conditions prevailing on the main floating wind markets (with three product classes adapted to different environmental conditions) and compatible with all 15 MW+ wind turbines currently available. This product retains the competitive advantages of the Damping Pool® patent, particularly its compactness, with dimensions limited to 54 meters, and its shallow draft, below 12 meters in operation. It can be easily scalable to the next 20 MW+ wind turbines when available. This standard product, pre-certified in advance, unlocks mass-production by allowing multiple projects to be supplied from the same manufacturing line.
BW Ideol has also unveiled its manufacturing line blueprint, easily scalable and replicable on multiple port infrastructures, for the mass production of concrete floating foundations. This blueprint, optimizing each manufacturing steps, has a demonstrated capacity to produce up to one floating foundation per week, with minimal harbor requirements, guaranteeing local manufacturing and delivery time. It encompasses the structuration of the supply chain to ensure a lean manufacturing, its digitalization, quality control and a reduced carbon footprint.
Associated with the standard product, this manufacturing blueprint unleashes the volume effect to drive costs down across projects and provides developers with an early guarantee on price and delivery schedule. BW Ideol is the first floating foundation supplier to propose such an approach.
“The floating wind market is at a crossroads today: tens of gigawatts will need to be built in the coming years, requiring a change in paradigm from the floating foundation suppliers. We believe that adopting an approach similar to that of wind turbine manufacturers is necessary: offering a single and standard product, suitable for all geographies and turbines available on the market, produced in series based on manufacturing line serving multiple projects, so that developers can truly commit and know where they are heading,” declared Paul de la Guérivière, Founder and CEO of BW Ideol.
