Antoine Peiffer from Principle Power joins me from California this week to explore the myths and realities of floating wind.
It’s not just fantasy anymore as he tells me his team has now generated one terawatt hour of clean electricity from turbines that never touch the seabed. From the first minute it’s clear this is not a niche experiment, it’s a serious new chapter for offshore wind.
Antoine told me floating wind is basically a giant turbine sitting on a buoyant steel platform held in place with mooring lines rather than piles. When I asked how big these things get he just laughed and said turbines are heading towards “20, 25 megawatt” giants with “rotor sizes actually in the 300 meter range.” These are not toys, they are oil rig scale machines built for brutal conditions.
He explained the anchoring system too. Instead of hammering steel into the seabed, they use drag anchors that sit “10 to 20m under the seabed” and can be removed at the end of a project. No concrete, no permanent scarring. Antoine even told me their platforms attract marine life and can work “like an artificial reef,” which flips the whole offshore wind impact debate on its head.
The real sell though is performance. Floating wind opens up deep water sites where the wind is stronger, cleaner and more consistent. Antoine said capacity factors hit “50s, 60%” which is huge and exactly what we need as electrification ramps up. Add in the fact that “70% of the world population” lives near the coast and you can see why this technology matters.
Storms were my next question. Antoine told me they have survived “waves of up to 20m” with winds at “200 kilometer per hour.” The trick is shifting water between columns to keep the tower vertical even when the platform is rocking. It’s clever engineering driven by lessons from oil and gas but built for renewables.
He finished with a view of the future.
Floating wind will run alongside fixed turbines at first then scale hard through the 2030s as countries like the UK, France and South Korea push commercial projects. He’s adamant it becomes a global industry because anywhere with deep water and good wind can jump in.
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