There’s plenty of action, they say, on Hovedø in the midsummer nights, but that’s hard to imagine when you’re bored, waiting for some wind in the Færder Regatta only a few hundred metres away.
Boredom can at times be a source of innovation. To children who complain they’re bored, smart parents say “Fine, keep it up. When you’ve been bored a while, you’ll surely come up with something.”
Sjur E. Bratland
At the Alarga Academy in January, Statoil’s Sjur E. Bratland told the story in which boredom led to innovation in renewable energy at our energy giant.
“It started at the Færder Regatta in 2001,” said Bratland.
As often happens in that race, the best boats took off with the best wind. When the wind calmed, many others were left behind, outside Nesodden.
On one of these boats sat Statoil employees Dag Christensen and Knut Solberg. As they sat on deck killing time, they fixed their eyes on a floating buoy bobbing up and down on the water. Then a fantastic idea struck them: “What if the buoy were 100 metres tall instead of four, and had rotating blades on top?”
Windmill on a napkin
It occurred to them that this may perhaps be a way to catch the wind blowing over the oceans and convert it into electricity. They later discussed their ideas with other colleagues and, together, they drew the first model of a floating windmill on a napkin.
The challenge in catching wind at sea is the great depths, but what no one had thought of earlier was that maybe you don’t have to build windmills that are attached to the sea floor. If a floating buoy could be held stable, could perhaps also a buoy many times larger?
They did some figuring, checked with designers and found out that it could be done. The math also showed that one windmill per square kilometre in a 70×70-kilometre area in the North Sea could double Norway’s production of electricity.
The idea was simply too compelling to let lie. And, luckily, Statoil was, and is, a company that sees the value in innovation and ideas, even the slightly crazy ones.
Highlight
Thus started a long development phase. Since 2001, Hywind has undergone a number of test phases. The preliminary highlight came in September 2009 when Statoil towed the world’s first floating wind turbine 10 kilometres out to sea outside Karmøy.
Now, Hywind looms 65 metres above the surface and juts 100 metres below. On top are the rotor blades with a diameter of 80 metres.
The Hywind concept combines known technology with a brand new concept, and opens up possibilities for the wind industry to catch wind energy on deep waters.
“It is puzzling that nobody has thought of this before,” says Sjur E. Bratland.
There have been many challenges in the project. At one phase, one of the biggest problems was finding someone to build turbines for the windmill. Inquiries were sent to many major manufacturers, but none of them was particularly interested.
Aim to bring down costs
The first installation has commenced a two-year trial period. The pilot project combines technologies from the wind, oil and gas industries and utilises the expertise Statoil has accumulated through its many years’ experience in the offshore oil and gas business.
The floating structure consists of a steel jacket filled with ballast. The floating element juts 100 metres below the surface and is attached to the sea floor with three anchor piles.
The wind turbine proper was built by Siemens. Technip has built the floating elements and been in charge of assembling the structure at sea.
Nexans Norway has installed the cable to land. The electricity is lead to land near Skudeneshavn at the southern point of Karmøy, where the local grid provider, Haugaland Kraft, operates a receiving station.
The main purpose of Hywind is not to generate income from the energy it produces, but to test how wind and wave power act on the structure. When Statoil gets the answer to that, the company can apply the results from the test period to further commercialise the concept. The aim is to bring down the costs so that floating wind power can compete in the energy market.
“The core expertise acquired by Statoil as a leading offshore operator within oil and gas, has proven to be of major importance in developing the Hywind concept,” says Bratland.
Hywind is an important component of Statoil’s strategy. The company is today one of the world’s biggest suppliers of energy, with 30,000 employees and operations in 40 countries.
“We want to keep being one of the world’s biggest,” said Bratland. “To do so, we will build the future on three legs: maximise the resource potential on the Norwegian continental shelf, secure international growth and develop new renewable forms of energy.”
In the future, we will see many different types of energy. “There is ongoing research on extracting energy from more than just wind. Solar, bio, geometric, tide and wave energy are some of the other alternative power sources,” said Bratland to the scholarship holders and sponsors at the Alarga Academy.
