Wind Catching Systems: Offshore Modular Multirotor Technology

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Rosemary interviews Ivar Knutsen, Senior VP of Technical and Supply Chain at Wind Catching Systems, to discuss their innovative floating offshore wind concept. Wind Catching's design features a grid of small wind turbines that benefit from the multirotor effect and enable easier installation and maintenance compared to traditional large offshore turbines. Wind Catching will also present at the Multi Rotor 2024 seminar June 12-13. You can find more information here: https://multirotor24.zohobackstage.eu/MR24. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to a special episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Rosie Barnes, and I have today with me Ivar Knutsen who is the Senior Vice President for Technical and Supply Chain at Wind Catching. Thanks for joining us, Ivar. Ivar Knutsen: Thank you for inviting us, Rosie. Rosemary Barnes: Okay, so for those who don't know, I'm just gonna quickly start by summarizing what the concept of Wind Catching is. So basically it's a grid of wind turbines that is floating offshore. So you've got a whole lot of small wind turbine turbines arranged in the grid, and they're benefiting from being close to together with the multirotor effect, which we'll get into later. And obviously there's also, more modularity all the. Turbines are arranged in this grid so that they can all yaw at the same time to face a differing wind direction. And yeah I'll hand it over to you Eva to explain more about what the concept is and yeah, why you decided that this was a, an interesting company to get involved with. Ivar Knutsen: It has become apparent to us that there are fundamental differences Between a bottom fixed and a floating wind turbine and they those differences are so big that you might need to Take a second look at that, you need to maybe consider a completely new approach to the design, but also to the operation. So we find that multi rotors have three or four key benefits. One is that you're actually able to avoid. The infamous tow to port. If the turbines are sufficiently small, you can handle them offshore and perform a turbine replacement offshore without using a crane vessel. You just need to bring people aboard a unit as long as you have the right technology to, to do that. And as, as we see it, there are no options for. Return to port for big single rotor floaters today, there are many concepts out there, but we don't see any of them as being tackling the real problems is that it's going on in an offshore environment with a lot of motions. The other thing we also find very interesting about multirotors is that you decouple the turbine development from the sort of the development, both on the supply chain, but also on capacity. So if you can go from 20 to 30 to 40 megawatts without developing new turbines for every single step, that's interesting. If you can use the same turbine, But you can change your installed capacity by building on your support structure. That is a very interesting part of the multirotor concept. And the other thing is that with a standardized turbine, you can actually enable a much broader supply chain. You can enable local content in each country because the sophistication required to turbine is much lower. And the reason for that, this is that if you now look at the biggest turbines and the turbines expected to come later. With blade lengths of 120,