Ocean Engineering Blog:

There’s nothing quick about developing an offshore wind farm. It takes years of site selection, political and financial wrangling, environmental reviews, and careful construction to make it all happen. But those timelines could be getting shorter thanks to developments in the European offshore wind market. An article in IEEE Spectrum in June 2017 noted a… Read More

On average, European offshore wind turbines stand in 29 meters (95 feet) of water about 44 kilometers (27 miles) from the shore, WindEurope reports. These two stats underscore one of the key reasons why offshore wind in U.S. waters is a flyspeck compared to the installed capacity of European wind farms. The first U.S. offshore… Read More

It’s impossible to separate underwater engineering from the research emerging from major universities. Indeed, this engineering discipline is proving central to the evolution of offshore wind power in the United States. That’s especially true at three Ohio universities, where researchers are building a scientific and engineering foundation for the development of offshore wind in the… Read More

While Europe gets all the credit for the rise of efficient offshore wind farms, there’s a lot of potential brewing in Asia — especially in countries that already have active land-based wind power. China has already built so many inland wind farms on land that it has more capacity than its interior population can use… Read More

A shallow patch of the North Sea is the site of an intriguing plan to reduce the cost and complexity of offshore wind farms. Announced in March 2017, the plan calls for the construction of an artificial island to form the hub of a massive network of wind turbines. One key advantage of a hub… Read More

May 1, 2017, is the scheduled cutover date for the Block Island Wind Farm, whose five turbines will begin transmitting up to 30 megawatts of wind-generated power to the mainland power grid. The towers are arranged near Block Island, a tourist destination off the coast of Rhode Island that has about a thousand permanent residents…. Read More

Server farms are increasingly crucial to the success of wind farms — offshore and otherwise. Data scientists armed with cloud-hosted analytics applications and tower-based telemetry can track every minute in the life of a wind turbine. This is especially crucial in the rugged offshore environment, where storms, corrosion, sea life and everyday wear and tear… Read More

If you follow the evolution of marine energy like we do, you’re bound to see references to marine biogeography. We’ve come to see why marine biogeography will play a crucial role in the development of offshore wind and other marine-energy sources. The basics on marine biogeography What is marine biogeography, and why does it matter… Read More

Synthetic cable is stronger than steel on a strength-to-weight basis, which makes it an attractive option in marine environments. The key challenge of synthetic cable is what you do about the attachment points, or terminations. Terminations can cut the tensile strength of synthetic cable by more than 50 percent, potentially defeating the purpose of going… Read More

The rebound in crude oil prices brought a measure of optimism to Subsea Expo 17 in Aberdeen, Scotland. With WTI crude trading in the low $50s per barrel — up from the low $30s a year ago — folks at the trade show and conference seemed hopeful that the worst is over in the oil… Read More