Many of DeepWind's members have come from the oil and gas sector and have extensive experience of building, deploying and servicing floating structures in one of the harshest offshore environments in the world, the North Sea.
Married to this is the knowledge gained from 15 years of offshore wind development in the UK, and globally, including our members who have pioneered the development of floating wind. This expertise is now being captured and concentrated in our Floating Offshore Wind Subgroup.
The aim of creating this subgroup is to bring together the supply chain elements that make up the major components of floating wind. Our members cover all aspects of floating wind including substructures, mooring systems, anchoring, installation, electrical systems (connectors and dynamic cables), subsea surveys and inspections.
Complementary to this unique blend of skills and expertise is our infrastructure members, representing over 25 ports and harbours in Scotland, who are looking to develop the necessary manufacturing, assembly and maintenance facilities required for this emerging sector.
The DeepWind FOW Subgroup contains many of the leading floating wind developers as well as European, US and Japanese substructure design and supply companies who together are responsible for many of the current and future floating wind projects either operational or planned. Many of the companies have been attracted to DeepWind by the potential for Scotland to become a global hub of floating offshore wind development.
Our FOW Subgroup brings together all the actors necessary to develop a complete floating wind supply chain and includes a blend of developers, industry, training and research players capable of forging a strong sub-cluster within DeepWind.
Scotland currently leads the global development of floating offshore wind with the worlds two largest, grid connected floating wind projects, Equinor's Hywind Scotland wind farm and ACS Group's 50MW Kincardine Offshore Wind project, which currently holds the title of the largest.
Not resting on its laurels, Scotland is soon to deliver a third floating project, the 100MW Pentland project being developed by Copenhagen Offshore Partners near Dounreay on the coast of Caithness in the Scottish Highlands.
Also, in a move that made headlines across Europe and beyond, Crown Estate Scotland, the Scottish Government body responsible for offshore wind leasing has given out leases set to develop 13 commercial scale floating wind projects in the ScotWind round with over 19.2GW of floating wind capacity.
These new sites range in size from 500MW to the largest at 3,000MW and a full list of the projects and the associated developers is available in our section on the Scottish Offshore Wind Market. The sheer scale of this new round will create huge opportunities for our Subgroup members as we build a floating wind supply chain dedicated to serial production of the components required to deliver these projects and will cement Scotland's place as the global leader of the floating offshore wind sector.
It is therefore fitting that our first subgroup in DeepWind was dedicated to floating offshore wind.
A list of our FOW Subgroup member companies is laid out below. With 433 members it is one of the largest floating wind supply chain clusters in the world in its own right and is also the largest of DeepWind's specialist Subgroups.
DeepWind's Floating Offshore Wind (FOW) Subgroup assists the development of new systems, products and services by working closely with the UK's innovation champions including the Carbon Trust's Floating Wind Joint Industry Project and the ORE Catapult's Floating Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence.
Many of DeepWind's developer members are already involved in both groups (13 members in the joint industry project and 14 in the Centre of Excellence). This offers a good opportunity to coordinate the UK's floating wind innovation landscape through the developer grouping.
At an international level, one of the first groups to form was the Friends of Floating Offshore Wind (FFOW) which had the commercialisation of floating wind technologies as one of their core objectives.
Further innovation and deployment is the key to reaching this goal and it dovetails neatly with DeepWind's own aims and goals. Eleven of the fifteen strong group of intentional companies that were members of FFOW are now in the DeepWind FOW Subgroup with the opportunity for international co-operation and co-ordination strong.
DeepWind has grown the international co-operation theme with links to other floating wind clusters such as the Norwegian Offshore Wind Cluster (NOW), Bretagne Ocean Power in Brittany and Wind'Occ based in Montpelier in the Occitanie Region in France.
Our Memo of Understanding with the WAB cluster from Bremerhaven, Northern Germany also covers floating wind so, while they are not a dedicated floating wind cluster like the others above, they have members who have a vested interest in floating wind technologies and the wider FOW market and are therefore part of our international collaboration in floating wind.
Our gallery of substructure members show steel and concrete designs that have already been deployed or are being developed. Use the arrows to move through the gallery on the left.
Explore our other DeepWind subgroups and the benefits of membership.
Operation and maintenance is one of the long term opportunity areas attached to the development of offshore wind in Scotland.
Our Power2X Subgroup is involved in looking at alternate products from offshore wind besides the normal electricity to the grid business model.
Onshore and offshore exports cables, subsea array and dynamic cables, this subgroup covers all aspects of offshore wind cables
From early stage development surveys to all aspects of aerial, surface and subsea inspections, this subgroup covers it all.
