One day soon, a platform 50 times as large may float in the deep waters of the North Sea, buoying up a massive wind turbine to harvest the steady, strong breezes there. About an hour’s ride up the coast, full-scale 3,000-tonne behemoths already float in Aberdeen Bay, capturing enough wind energy to electrify nearly 35,000 Scottish households. The prototype at the FloWave facility—one of 10 new floating wind-power designs tested here—is progressing fast, says Tom Davey, who oversees testing. “Everything you see here has been manufactured and put in the water in the last couple months.” There’s good reasons for this hustle: The United Kingdom wants to add 34 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030, en route to decarbonizing its grid by 2035. But the shallow waters east of London are already packed with wind turbines. Scotland’s deeper waters are therefore the U.K.’s next frontier. Auctions have set aside parcels for 27 floating wind farms, with a combined capacity exceeding 24 GW.  The steadiest, strongest wind blows over deep water—well beyond the 60- to 70-meter limit for the fixed foundations that anchor traditional wind turbines to the ocean floor. And in many places, such as North America’s deep Pacific coast, the strongest and steadiest wind blows in the evening, which would perfectly complement solar energy’s daytime peaks. Hence the push for wind platforms that float. The Biden administration has called for 15 GW of floating offshore wind capacity in the United States by 2035, and recent research suggests that the U.S. Pacific coast could support 100 GW more by midcentury. Ireland, South Korea, and Taiwan are among the other countries with bold floating wind ambitions. The question is how to scale up the technology to gigawatt scale. This global debate is pitting innovation against risk. In the innovation end are people like Davey and the FloWave team, who’ve already advanced several floating wind devices to sea trials. One FloWave-tested platform, engineered by Copenhagen-based Stiesdal Offshore, was recently selected for a 100-megawatt wind farm to be built off Scotland’s northern tip in 2025. To fully understand what developers are up against, it helps to know how hard it is to deploy any kind of wind power at sea. The 15-MW turbines being ordered today for tomorrow’s offshore wind farms weigh roughly 1,000 tonnes. The foundations of traditional offshore wind turbines are also massive steel or concrete structures that have to be embedded in the ocean floor.You can do without vessels to move all of this out to deep water by using a floating platform. The equipment can be fully assembled on shore and then towed to the site. But having a platform that floats compounds the challenge of supporting the towering turbine. Beyond the technological advantages of using a tried-and-true approach, there’s a financial upside, Smith says. Floating wind developers must convince risk-averse bankers and insurers to back their projects, and it helps to be able to point to your project’s use of established technology. In years past, offshore wind investors who backed innovative but flawed designs suffered huge losses,.Meanwhile, floating wind’s mold-breakers are offering an ever-expanding diversity of technology options. At least 80 designs for platforms or integrated platform-turbines now vie for the floating wind market.......and much more                    https://spectrum.ieee.org/floating-offshore-wind-turbine