Scaling up floating offshore wind farm installation: From conventional to modular strategies

With only small-scale floating offshore wind (FOW) farms installed to date, and commercial-scale projects anticipated in the coming years, reconsidering conventional installation strategies is essential to understand the challenges associated with scaling up. To this end, this paper introduces a novel discrete-event simulation model, instaSIM® , which is validated against data corresponding to the Hywind Scotland farm, demonstrating discrepancies of less than five days between simulated and observed durations. Once validated, different scenarios for scaling up FOW installation are evaluated. Results indicate that farms comprising more than 10–15 turbines cannot be installed within a single year using the conventional installation strategy, with installation costs increasing significantly due to metocean-related delays. To address these limitations, three modular installation strategies are proposed and evaluated for a 40-turbine and 600-MW FOW farm: parallel, consecutive and hybrid. Compared to the conventional baseline of 1200 days and 225 M€, all three strategies reduce total installation costs by 54%. However, the total duration varies across strategies: the parallel approach requires 137 days (88% reduction), while the hybrid strategy requires 500 days (58% lower) and the consecutive configuration extends to 1232 days. In addition to cost savings, the modular strategies enable an earlier power generation and faster CAPEX recovery. By the time the conventional strategy completes installation and starts producing energy, the consecutive, hybrid and parallel approaches would have already produced 3.8 TWh, 6.4 TWh and 7.7 TWh of electricity, respectively, corresponding to revenues of 840 M€, 1370 M€ and 1650 M€, and CAPEX recoveries of 29%, 48% and 57%. • Discrete-event model for commercial-scale floating wind farm installation. • Conventional installation limits scalability beyond 10–15 turbines. • Modular strategies offer the potential to cut installation costs by about 54%. • Modular installation enables earlier power generation during construction. • Early substation deployment enables up to 57% CAPEX recovery.