Portugal's EDP gets EC funding for new offshore wind foundation

Wind turbine at sea. Author: Andy S-D. License: Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic

Portuguese utility EDP (ELI:EDP) received EUR 19.2 million (USD 20.3m) in non-reimbursable finance from the European Commission to develop gravity-based offshore wind foundations.

The total investment in the project stands at EUR 26.8 million, EDP announced on Monday, noting that its renewables arm, EDP Renovaveis (ELI:EDPR), would coordinate the entire effort. The funding comes through the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme.

DEMOGRAVI3, as the technology project is named, aims to create a gravity-based foundation for offshore wind turbine installation in average water depths of 30 to 60 metres. The project will take about four years to complete and will include a full-scale demonstration installation in Agucadoura lake, Povoa de Varzim city.

The foundation will be installed on the seabed after it has been assembled onshore, thus avoiding the need to use heavy-lift vessels. The whole structure of the turbine and its constituent elements will be assembled onshore and then transported.

Currently, Europe has 8 GW of offshore wind capacity, but the figure will grow to between 21 GW and 30 GW by 2020, even without the contribution of medium and deep waters technologies such as DEMOGRAVI3 and WindFloat, according to EDP.

The Portuguse firm has several partners in DEMOGRAVI3 project, including the NEW R&D – Centre for New Energy Technologies, the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Harbour Research Lab), Acciona Infraestructuras (Spain) and Norway's Global Maritime AS, among others.

(EUR 1 = USD 1.060)

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