Renewable Energy
Floating Wind
Gazelle Prepares for a Floating Wind Future
As offshore wind power spreads globally, it’s widely acknowledged that the maturing of floating wind power platforms will exponentially increase the availability of resources, as the majority of wind power lies outside the installation zone of fixed systems. Enter Gazelle Wind Power, which offers a compelling, modular engineered solution and value proposition to the market. Newly minted Gazelle CFO Alvaro Ortega discusses the outlook for Gazelle in the offshore floating wind sector.
By Greg Trauthwein
Today, it’s acknowledged that the vast potential for offshore wind extends beyond the reach of traditional fixed-bottom units, and conservative estimates call for 300 GW of floating offshore wind by 2050, according to Gazelle CFO Alvaro Ortega. “This is just floating, so that is the massive opportunity for Gazelle.”
As the advent of fixed offshore wind is still in its adolescence, talk increasingly turns toward floating offshore wind, a technology and market that was, for the most part, only recently born.
“Waters more than 60 meters deep require [a floating wind solution], said Ortega, “it cannot be bottom-fixed [at that depth].”
When talk turns to floating wind, there are many long-established technologies and companies in the floating offshore oil and gas industry that will translate to floating wind. However, it’s not an exact match, and the key will be to maximize efficiencies of the platform and its foundation, which account for 30 - 40% of the cost.
Gazelle is banking on its modular solution, which Ortega says should represent a 30% reduced platform cost versus the semi-submersibles on the market today. “We are targeting 75% less of mooring length compared. So less mooring length, less materials will be used.”
Gazelle Today
By Ortega’s estimation, Gazelle is racing to bring its solution to bear, as it is currently in its fourth round of funding and just completing prototype, small-scale basin tests at the Imperial College in London, in Plymouth, England as well as in Northern Spain. “So far, the results at a very small scale have been successful. So our next steps is to develop and to deploy the pilot, and we are already working on that, aiming for deployment by the end of 2024 off the coast of Portugal, using private equity but also looking for public grants, too.”
Gazelle is banking on its design as the key differentiator in the floating wind sector, a design that is modular – making it easier to build, transport and deploy – as well as a design that offers significant reductions in some critical cost and environmental impact areas.
Last year Gazelle unveiled its next generation technology, an enhanced design that further refined the company’s solution to address the primary challenges facing the offshore wind industry – cost, supply chain bottlenecks and sustainability – by providing a lightweight, cheaper technology that minimizes the impact on fragile marine environments while using existing port infrastructure.
As a third-generation technology, the platform is designed to deliver enhanced mooring innovation that enables serial production. The platform makes first generation technology — which was primarily designed to float and survive harsh ocean conditions — obsolete and improves on second generation designs that are focused on industrialization.
Central to Gazelle’s long-term play is ‘reduction’: reducing costs by 30% compared to conventional semi-submersible designs; reducing the time to assemble and install the units at project sites via a modular assembly process; reducing environmental impact by using less steel and materials, while also helping to eliminate seabed scouring and installation impact.
The Gazelle platform’s unique geometry provides reduced draft in port, which means it floats higher in the water enabling the use of shallow ports with high stability in towing and wet storage. Pivoting arms allow the platform to move with the wind, waves, and tides that result in lower forces, enabling a lighter—and therefore cheaper—structure.
Further, the Gazelle platform uses a dynamic mooring system representing a paradigm shift from an active ballast to a natural, passive system that balances forces and motions through a counterweight, keeping the turbine pitch low and improving operational efficiency. Vertical mooring lines attached to the pivoting arms reduce the platform’s environmental footprint by minimizing impact and allowing for a 75% reduction in mooring length when compared to semi-submersibles with catenary mooring in depths of 100 meters or more.
Proving the Concept
Small-scale model testing and computer simulation are all nice and necessary parts of the development process, but Ortega and the entire Gazelle team know that the future depends on developing and proving the system works in one of the world’s harshest and unrelenting atmospheres.
“Developing the prototype is our main goal, and we are planning to have the prototype in the water by the end of 2026. We're already working on the pre-FEED, and now we're going to be working on the engineering portion. Our main goal is to prove the concept,” said Ortega. Apart from the technical, Gazelle is actively seeking partnerships – from developers to shipping companies to technology providers – as well as strategic investors that “come in not only to bring equity, but also to participate with us on the deployment.”
The opportunities for Gazelle, and in fact all players in the floating wind sector are literally boundless as the market evolves. “80% of the wind resources are in places where only offshore floating wind can be deployed,” said Ortega. “When we look at the map, the three main areas where we are planning include Europe, which represents 60GW of potential;. Asia Pacific and its 81GW of potential; and then North America, where we're talking about 31GW,” Ortega said.
While envisioning market potential is the end game, Ortega and the Gazelle team are firmly planted in the here and now, focusing first on the pilot test, plus the most recent news where Gazelle were preselected for a project seeking to deploy 1GW of floating wind on the Italy’s side of Adriatic Sea by the end of 2028.
“The developer is Maverick, controlled by Green Bridge, and it released plans for this wind farm, that will include 70 turbines of 15MW each, and has preselected Gazelle as one of the providers for the offshore wind platform. So, we're not only talking about a pilot; we're also talking about some specific projects that we're planning to use our offshore wind platforms.”
Armed with an innovative design that offers much promise, Ortega nonetheless sees many hurdles to clear.
“I think one of the main challenges is bringing this third generation of turbines to place. [Phase one was] to float, being able to deploy platforms to float and survive, but not to be industrialized. The second is where we are right now, looking to solve the main issues of fabrication, assembly, as well as the issues with very deep waters on the West Coast of the United States where we have one kilometer or more. [The third generation] is innovation in the supply chain, improving the assembly process to make it scalable and easy to attach. As in our case, manufacturing different modules that attach to each other rather than having to produce the whole platform in a manufacturing facility and then transferring that massive [structure]. And, being able to do this without having to make major infrastructure investments, which can be in the billions of dollars,” Ortega concluded.