Wednesday May 17th, 2017
The Floatgen project, the largest offshore wind turbine in France on which construction is soon due to be completed in the port of Saint-Nazaire, has won the Usine Nouvelle 2017 Renewable Energies Trophy for Energy Transition at the ceremony organised on Tuesday 16 May in the presence of Jean Jouzel, climatologist and former vice-president of GIEC.
The third edition of the Energy Transition Trophies has honoured the Floatgen offshore floating prototype wind turbine equipped with a floating foundation structure designed by the French specialist group Ideol and built by Bouygues Travaux Publics, in the port of Saint-Nazaire, which should be installed off the coast of Croisic on the SEM-REV test site operated by Centrale Nantes.
More than 80 % of the floating foundation’s concrete shell has already been constructed. The entire anchoring system has been built and shall be installed at the offshore SEM-REV site in June, before the prototype is brought into service by the end of 2017.
Floating wind turbines represent the future of offshore wind turbine production. These types of turbine enable the development of projects without any depth constraints and therefore far offshore, and without any visual impact, in the sites with the greatest wind speeds. Floatgen illustrates the reality of the emergence of this type of project.
Offshore wind turbines represent a very high-growth sector. Over 3,600 wind turbines are currently operational in the world, representing cumulative investments of EUR 65 billion since 2010.
This new industry has emerged worldwide, except in France, where there are currently no offshore wind turbines. The first of these will be Floatgen, a floating wind turbine.
Although France is lagging in terms of the traditional offshore wind turbines fixed on the seabed, it nonetheless enjoys a number of unique advantages as the international leader in the new floating wind turbine industry.
The solution developed and patented by Ideol (called Damping Pool®), which is perceived as being the most competitive in the market, marks a technological breakthrough in the offshore wind turbine market and opens up a wide range of potential projects to be developed globally. This technology has been selected by the French government to equip the first Mediterranean offshore windfarm project (Eolmed managed by the energy group Quadran) and has won export contracts in Japan, the UK and Ireland.
Building and Civil Works generates 250 million tonnes of waste per year. Today, only 40% of this waste is reclaimed, yet the Energy Transition Act imposes a threshold of 70%, to be reached by 2020. Transitioning from a traditional, linear economy toward a circular economy means entirely rethinking how we manage a worksite's materials in order to produce in a more sustainable and sensible way.
Nature provides an endless source of inspiration. Observing nature to inspire technological innovation is the very essence of biomimicry.
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