Mooring systems are a crucial component of a floating offshore wind installation. However, there is currently a high level of uncertainty surrounding floating specific mooring systems in terms of project risk and lifetime cost.
The Floating Wind JIP would like to:
- Investigate the likelihood and impact of mooring failure specific to floating offshore wind systems. Undertake analysis to understand the root cause failures within oil and gas and how these could potentially translate to failure rates in floating wind.
- Undertake a comparison of the different floater type foundations and their respective mooring system configuration designs to understand their effect on specific floating wind failure rates. This should look at semi-sub, barge and SPAR type floaters as a minimum whilst also taking into consideration different respective site conditions and the potential impact this could have upon floating offshore wind systems.
- Understand and quantify potential failure rates, taking into consideration inspections during operation and their potential in addressing failure rates. Look at through-life cost comparison between redundant and non-redundant systems across a range of different mooring technologies taking into consideration the relationship between initial CAPEX and ongoing OPEX of a project.
- Undertake analysis of synthetic mooring line options in context to their potential to reduce failure rates and failure modes. Using in-depth analysis of failure rates and root-causes analyse synthetic mooring line options and quantify how they could benefit CAPEX / OPEX.
- Understand how the mooring system redundance is affected by the integrated design with the floater and WTG.
- Develop proposals and guidelines for the basis of floating offshore wind standards in context to mooring design, validation of synthetic systems and requirement for redundancy in context to quantifying and defining the level of risk or consequence.
- Understand the different mooring system designs and evaluate these based upon specific scenarios such as floater design (type, weight distribution) water depth, met ocean conditions, soil conditions and marine growth conditions.
To perform this in-depth analysis and route-cause determination of failure and the requirement for redundancy, the mooring system should be considered as part of a coupled system (specifically interaction between moorings, platform, and turbine) throughout the project.
The deadline for clarification questions has passed. Responses to the clarification questions are included below.
The closing date to receive tender submissions is 18 November 2021 17:00 GMT.
All clarification questions and tender submissions should be sent electronically, by their respective deadlines, to alistair.morris@carbontrust.com, with floatingwind@carbontrust.com in copy.
