World’s largest floating wind farm will use Kongsberg Maritime technologies

Image: Equinor

As part of a contract with industrial solutions provider Wood PLC, Kongsberg Maritime is to supply key positioning and monitoring equipment to Equinor’s Hywind Tampen floating wind farm.

Hywind Tampen is an 88 MW floating wind power project intended to provide electricity for the Snorre and Gullfaks offshore field operations in the Norwegian North Sea.

It will be the world’s first floating wind farm to supply renewable energy directly to offshore oil and gas platforms, and Kongsberg Maritime will supply technologies from its existing offshore product portfolio to meet the specific challenges posed by operating in this challenging and sometimes hostile environment.

By using proven equipment which is already successfully in use in other areas of the offshore maritime market, Kongsberg is able to ensure safe, tried-and-tested performance whilst at the same time reducing both cost and development time.

Kongsberg Maritime’s portfolio of solutions for positioning in the offshore environment is built on many years of experience and application know-how, and core to the Hywind Tampen product delivery is its DPS position reference system and Motion Reference Unit (MRU). The DPS exploits all available GNSS infrastructure to deliver continuously available, reliable position information, and is ideally suited to monitor the location of the turbines relative to the seabed. This will help to ensure secure, safe and optimal positioning for each unit within the wind farm.

The MRU will check roll, pitch, yaw and heave motion, informing the blade trimming system to ensure that the turbine is not overloaded in strong winds and thus likely to become unstable. Marine traffic situational awareness and visibility to other vessels will be facilitated by the AIS AQ610 base station. All the Kongsberg equipment permits remote access and monitoring.

Vidar Bjørkedal, vice president sales and customer support, Kongsberg Seatex AS, said: “We are delighted to be involved with this innovative project. Kongsberg Maritime’s offshore positioning portfolio leads the market, and it is a testament to the versatility of these existing technologies that they are being shown to be optimal for use in a range of diverse applications, including wind farms.”