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Last Updated on: 9th March 2025, 11:14 am
With one swipe of his pen, the rogue Commander-in-Chief who occupies the White House snuffed out the entire US offshore wind industry. Well, almost. A few shreds remain, and one of those shreds has just passed a key milestone on the way to bringing a new offshore floating wind turbine platform to market — if not here in the US, then elsewhere in the world. After all, it’s a big world out there.
A New Floating Offshore Wind Turbine Platform
The new floating offshore wind turbine platform is a global venture, spearheaded by the California startup ECO TLP with support from the Dutch engineering firm Mocean Offshore and the British sustainable development specialist Arup International Projects. In 2023, ECO submitted the design to the Houston-based global certification organization American Bureau of Shipping, which provided it with the status of Approval In Principle.
“The unique design from ECO TLP™ utilizes slip-formed cylindrical concrete hulls and gravity anchors, which, when combined with a tension-leg mooring system, has a smaller footprint than traditional structures using steel column-stabilized hulls,” ABS observed.
Aside from the smaller footprint, the new platform is designed to streamline the installation process for floating offshore wind turbines, located in waters between 250 and 2,000 meters deep.
“Looking at both capital and operational expenses, we are an extremely low-cost solution, incorporating available, non-proprietary components and standard local labor support across the globe,” noted ECO CEO Nicole Johnson Murphy.
Streamlining The Floating Offshore Wind Process
The Approval In Principle set the new offshore wind platform up for the next approval step, Front End Engineering Design (FEED). That approval came through last month. “The unique design supports the largest wind turbines on the market and utilizes slip-formed cylindrical concrete hulls and a variety of anchor types,” ABS noted in a press statement.
The FEED approval is non-site-specific. In effect, it enables ECO to trim down the certification process that applies to commercial projects in specific locations.
“Achieving this is an important milestone for our solution, allowing us to operate in the water safely and qualify for financial and insurance terms,” Murphy explained.
“With FEED documents approved, the design moves into commercialization for site-specific projects,” ABS noted.
How Does It Work?
Floating platforms extend the reach of offshore wind turbines far beyond the relatively shallow waters that characterize conventional wind farm locations. Instead of being perched on a monopile fixed into the seabed, floating turbines are anchored to the ocean floor by cables.
The cost of the floating platform is one obstacle standing in the way of a competitive price for floating offshore wind. Typical floating platforms are designed with extensions to stabilize the turbine. ECO ditches that approach in favor of a single, cylindrical concrete foundation designed to accommodate next-generation wind turbines of 15 megawatts and up.
Like other offshore platform stakeholders, ECO deploys commonly found materials to leverage local supply chains, labor, and manufacturing facilities near or at seaports. The concrete foundation also doubles as an artificial reef and carbon sink, indicating that ECO plans to deploy the new, negative-carbon concrete emerging on the market.
The foundation can also serve triple duty as a “compressed energy and green fuel storage” system, which suggests that ECO is eyeballing opportunities in the emerging offshore green hydrogen industry.
“The ECO TLP installation process can be fabricated with local materials and labor anywhere in the world, port-side on deployment vessels or for self-tow, employing non-proprietary, competitively bid components,” ECO states, noting that it already has fabrication and assembly facilities lined up in the US as well as Norway, Australia, Asia and South America.
Meanwhile, Back In The USA …
Those plans for the US are somewhat optimistic, considering the havoc wreaked upon the offshore wind industry when President Trump ordered a pause on federal offshore lease areas. There is no such thing as private land out in the open sea, so without the federal lease areas, there is no US offshore wind industry.
Among those falling under the deadly blow is the 1.5 gigawatt Atlantic Shores project off the coast of New Jersey. Co-developer Shell pulled out of the project in January and its partner EDF followed suit in February.
One faint glimmer of hope emerged last week, when US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested that projects in the proposal stage are dead in the water, while offshore projects already in motion might squeak through.
Burgum floated the idea to a group of reporters while touring an LNG facility in Louisiana, and that’s where it gets interesting. When Trump suspended offshore leases, he also struck a blow at the industry’s 40-state supply chain, including numerous stakeholders in Louisiana. Due to its long, vigorous profile in the offshore oil and gas industry, the state is rich in experience and know-how that applies to wind energy. So rich, in fact, that multiple Louisiana-based firm were instrumental in building the nation’s very first commercial wind farm, located off the coast of Rhode Island.
“That was just for starters,” CleanTechnica observed in January. “The organization Louisiana Offshore Wind now lists Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts among the offshore projects serviced by surveyors, engineers, and shipbuilders based in Louisiana.” That includes, for example, building the specialized service vessels that help tighten up the construction timeline for offshore wind farms.
To make it even more interesting, industrial stakeholders in Louisiana are very much interested in getting their hands on clean, renewable energy. They serve global markets, and those markets continue to pursue decarbonization.
In terms of global influence, Louisiana is sitting in the catbird seat. Along with a skilled offshore workforce, Louisiana hosts the biggest seaport facility in the Western Hemisphere. That helps explain why, according to Louisiana Offshore Wind, the state has gobbled up 25% of all US offshore contracts by volume so far.
Onwards & Upwards For The Global Offshore Wind Industry
Oh, well, that is mostly kaput for now, but it’s a good guess that Burgum has been hearing plenty from offshore stakeholders in Louisiana and elsewhere.
Whether or not Burgum follows through on those off-the-cuff comments remains to be seen, but Louisiana does have one card left to play. Back in December of 2023, the Louisiana Mineral and Energy Board approved two nearshore projects located in state waters, sheltered from the Trump chopping block.
Meanwhile, ABS is busy helping other floating wind innovators get their technology into the water. The organization is no small potatoes. It maintains 200 offices in 70 different countries, supporting a network of surveyors, engineers, and other specialists. Among its certification and classification credits in the floating wind field are the first semisubmersible offshore wind turbine (WindFloat I), the world’s largest floating wind turbine (Windfloat Atlantic), and the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm (Kincardine).
In addition to the FEED approval for ECO, this year ABS has also supported a new, compact floating platform developed by the California firm Aikido Technologies, and a new semi-submersible platform from a branch of the French firm Bouygues Construction.
Photo (cropped): A new floating offshore wind turbine platform will help streamline floating wind farm construction all around the world, with the notable exception of the US (courtesy of ECO TLP).
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