Carbon Trust Offshore Wind Accelerator Launches Competition
The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) has launched a competition to accelerate the development of technologies with the potential to reduce vessel emissions and fuel consumption.
Up to £100,000 ($127,000) in funding will be awarded to the winning technologies, from a total funding pot of £300,000 ($382,000), to support technology development or demonstration.
The OWA Low Emission Vessels competition will focus on innovations for crew transfer vessels. Designs submitted to the competition will be assessed for overall cost, operations, and safety advantages to ensure they are viable solutions for offshore wind operations. Vessel designs, power and propulsion technologies as well as energy-providing systems will be considered within the scope of the competition.
The competition is being run in parallel with an OWA commissioned study to evaluate potential technologies for reducing emissions and fuel consumption that are suitable for offshore wind vessel safely.
The competition is being delivered by the Carbon Trust and Black & Veatch on behalf of the Scottish Government and the nine OWA industry partners: EnBW, E.ON, Equinor, Innogy, Ørsted, Scottish Power Renewables, Shell, SSE and Vattenfall Wind Power.
In April, the Carbon Trust announced the five winners of its dynamic export cable competition as a part of the Floating Wind Joint Industry Project, which aims to accelerate and support the development of commercial-scale floating wind farms. The competition, supported by BPP cables, was launched to address the lack of availability of high voltage dynamic export cables for the transmission of power from wind farms to shore, which has been identified by industry as a potential bottleneck for the commercial deployment of floating wind technology.
The objective of the competition was to ensure that this necessary technology is a viable option for developers for commercial floating wind projects within the next five to 10 years. The competition winners were Aker Solutions (Norway), Furukawa Electric (Japan), Hellenic Cables (Greece), JDR Cable Systems (U.K.) and Zhongtian Technology Submarine Cable (China).