National Renewable Energy Lab nets $5.7M for offshore wind turbine research

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) primary national lab for renewable energy and efficiency R&D — the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) — gained $5.7 million in funding this week to develop floating offshore wind turbines.

The funds come from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Under the arrangement, NREL will act as the prime contractor for three projects under the Aerodynamic Turbines Lighter and Afloat with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Servo-control (ATLANTIS) program.

“Offshore wind market forecasts show accelerated growth,” Brian Smith, NREL’s wind laboratory program manager, said. “These projects ensure that innovative floating offshore wind technologies (FOWTs) will continue to develop and expand U.S. offshore wind energy capacity.”

Specifically, NREL will focus on three areas.

The first is the development of an open-source software tool that can control co-design optimization of FOWTs. Dubbed Wind Energy with Integrated Servo-control (WEIS), the project has been awarded $2,708,864 and will unite NREL researchers with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The second will be data generation for FOWT loads, motion, and performance with the hopes of creating the first public FOWT scale-model dataset with advanced turbine and hull controls, as well as hull flexibility. For this, NREL gained $1,529,923 in funding. They will partner with the University of Maine and DNV GL to see it done.

Finally, they will seek to bolster the floating offshore wind market by lowering the cost of energy below 7.5 cents per kilowatt-hour — the cost for generation currently conducted by fixed-bottom offshore wind plants. This Ultraflexible Floating Offshore Wind Turbine (USFLOWT) project has been granted $1,500,000 and a slew of partnerships, working with organizations such as the Colorado School of Mines, Colorado University at Boulder, University of Virginia, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the American Bureau of Shipping.

ATLANTIS wants to approach floating offshore wind turbines from radically new means, focusing on maximizing rotor-area-to-total-weight ratio without sacrificing turbine generation efficiency. They also want to create a new generation of computer tools that will ease such design and development in the future, while collecting real data from full and lab-scale experiments as a means of validating the designs.