Submitted by Lars Ronning on 12/16/2009 6:51:56 PM Last updated by Lars Ronning on 12/16/2009 8:08:33 PM
December 10th 2009 marked an historic event in SNAME history. SNAME
members in the Norwegian cities of Stavanger and Bergen joined via
video conference for an evening of presentations and discussion on the
topic of Offshore Wind Energy. Hosts for the evening were Statoil in
Stavanger and Aker Solutions in Bergen, who made their dedicated video
conferencing equipment available. The 40+ members and guests were
joined by SNAME Honorary Vice-President, Peter Noble. The use of
modern dissemination tools such as video conferencing will allow
increased member participation, particularly in places like Norway
where our members are spread among a number of locations. The
Electronic Media Committee are evaluating this and similar technologies
for knowledge sharing across the Society.
Lars Rønning opened
the meeting by welcoming the attendees in Bergen and, through video
conference, the attendees in Stavanger. Erlend Hovland in Stavanger
thanked the attendees, and particularly the presenters, for making it
to the meeting despite the short notice.
Peter Noble started the
presentations in Bergen with his update on SNAME activities. Peter
mentioned the growth in membership, particularly in the Nordic region
and in student sections. The high activity level in the Society was
highlighted by the nine technical SNAME meetings in December in various
regions. Peter also listed 11 SNAME collegia and symposia planned for
2010, including a shipping symposium planned for the Nordic region in
September. Finally, Peter talked about recent website upgrades and the
successful 2009 Annual Meeting.
The
first technical presentation of the evening was by Pia Weider from Lyse
Produksjon in Stavanger. Pia started her presentation with an overview
of why there is such interest in offshore wind energy production. She
also showed EWEA 2009 predictions of future EU offshore wind energy
production - a more than six-fold increase in production by 2010 and a
prediction that by 2030 offshore wind will be more than 50% of the
total wind energy market. Next, the challenges in Norway were
presented. There is currently no legal framework for offshore wind
energy in Norway, however there is a proposition to be tried by
parliament in March 2010. However, there is a perceived lack of
political interest, and there are certainly financial challenges, with
subsidies and other support required. Pia finished her presentation
with an overview of various offshore wind projects Lyse are involved
in, including floating solutions like SWAY and bottomfounded solutions
like Vici Ventus.
The next presentation was by Rune Yttervik
from Statoil in Bergen. The topic of Rune's presentation was the
HYWIND demo project. Statoil is a large energy company, traditionally
involved in offshore oil and gas. They are using their experience with
fixed and floating offshore structures to develop feasible solutions
for the harnessing of offshore wind. As part of this, they are
evaluating the potential for offshore wind energy with the 400 million
NOK HYWIND demo project. This is a floating 2.3 MW wind turbine with
an all-steel hull and tower that sits 100m deep in the water. The
concept is intended for water depths between 120m and 700m. The
demonstration tower was moored outside Stavanger this summer, after
pre-assembly inshore and float-out to site prior to the turbine and
rotors being installed. The unit is heavily instrumented to supply
Statoil and their partners with valuable data, including motion
response, fatigue measurements and generator performance.
Following
a short break, the presentations resumed with a presentation on the
design of offshore wind turbines. The presenter was Tore Holmås from
Virtual Prototyping. Tore has vast experience from structural design
and analysis of offshore structures, as well as software development.
The first part of his presentation highlighted the predicted world
energy need, with a breakdown, indicating a need to replace
hydrocarbon-based energy in the years to come. Tore went on to talk
about the evolution of offshore wind turbines, with the present and
near-future being floating systems in deepwater, high-wind regions. He
went on to explain that wind power is proportional to the wind velocity
cubed, and to rotor diameter squared. This drives the desire to build
structures that can support operations in high-wind areas with larger
propellers and turbines. The SWAY concept has a rotor diameter of over
100m, which is more than 25% longer than the wingspan of an Airbus
A380. Similar to aircraft wings, due to their length and slenderness,
the rotors are very flexible and subject to large dynamic loads,
leading to fatigue concerns. The tower is also a slender, low-damped
floating structure. Tore's conclusion is that accurate numerical
modeling is important to evaluate the concept designs - the challenge
is developing the tools to do so.
The last presentation of the
evening was a very late change in the program. Damir Radan from IRIS
in Stavanger gave a presentation on various research activities within
offshore wind energy that IRIS is involved in, among them the WINDIS
test program. Currently there are a number of research efforts, some
of which had been mentioned in presentations earlier in the evening.
Damir highlighted studies on single wind turbines encompassing
aerodynamics, structural response, drivetrain response and
instrumentation and sensors. There are also efforts underway to look
at bigger scale issues, such as mulitple wind turbine wind parks,
maintenance and reliability assurance and installation challenges.
Damir shared some data on measured annual failure rates for existing
installations - this shows that there are higher failure rates expected
in the first few years of operation for large (>1000 kW) wind
turbines. Finally, the presentation covered numerical analysis, and in
particular the numerical simulation of the control system and fault
diagnosis.
There were a number of questions and discussions
after each of the presentations, with the attendees in Stavanger able
to ask the presenters in Bergen questions, and vice versa. This seemed
to work really well. The discussions covered a range of topics such as
storage of the electrical energy, who owns the wind and installation
challenges. Discussions continued on well after the last presentation.
Links to presentations: