The Squid floating wind connection system wet trial underway at Ardersier

The 40 tonne full scale device was fabricated at Aurora Energy Services' facility in Huntly, Aberdeenshire before being transported to the Ardersier Energy Transition Facility for inshore testing. 

The device allows a single operation which connects both the mooring and electrical connections to a floating wind substructure thus offering a less time consuming and lower installation cost for floating offshore wind. Encomara, a subsidiary of Inverness based Aurora Energy Services, will wet test the device at Ardersier until the end of August as part of its pathway to obtaining a fully commercial solution. The technology is currently at TR8 (Technology Readiness level) just one more step away from achieving TR9 i.e. fully commercial.
This follows on from the company's announcement at Global Offshore Wind event in June that the Squid has been awarded a Product Design Assessment (PDA) from the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS).

Encomara will now look to deploy their Squid connection technology at one of the floating wind projects currently under development to demonstrate the at operational level leading to the delivery of a fully commercial product. While their Huntly facility could supply enough units for one of the smaller floating wind farm of 100MW (up to 7 units) to deliver for a larger project of scale, in the ScotWind or INTOG leasing rounds, the company would need a new manufacturing facility and have said that Ardersier would be an ideal port site for such a facility. Such a new facility could employ up to 130 people and would be a significant addition to a floating offshore wind supply chain in Scotland.