Dublin Offshore.
Dublin Offshore (DO)are an Irish company that are developing a novel mooring technology, the Load Reduction Device (LRD), a Mooring innovation that lowers the cost for Floating Offshore Wind
Dublin Offshore (DO) is an Irish company developing a novel mooring technology, the Load Reduction Device (LRD), to be implemented in mooring systems for the FOW market and other offshore applications. Through the NWE Interreg project, the Marine Energy Alliance, DO received combined technical services from INNOSEA SAS (INNOSEA) and commercial services from Exceedence Ltd (EXC).
The technical service from INNOSEA was to assess the technical feasibility of the LRD by conducting Orcaflex dynamic simulations to compare the performance of an LRD-based fully synthetic Inclined Taut Mooring with the mooring performance of two standard mooring systems: catenary and semi-taut. The project was considered at intermediate water depth and moderate met-ocean conditions, representing a project type with existing market competitive mooring options.
Key findings
Through the combined technical and commercial services carried out by INNOSEA and Exceedence the project was able to show the following:
Commercial services from Exceedence
The commercial service from EXC was to provide techno-financial modelling of the LRD within a wider FOW project to understand the impact on the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) of the LRD as compared with a baseline built using publicly available information and industry knowledge.
The financial analysis by EXC, was carried out in the EXC techno-financial software tool, Exfin, that allows the user to quickly and intuitively build, analyse and optimise any type of marine renewable energy project. Two scenarios were investigated, one with current LCOE (2020) and the other with a future expected LCOE (2030). The inputs to the project Baselines were sourced from publicly available information and industry knowledge. By replacing the mooring & anchoring component in the Baselines with the cost of the LRD, a like-for-like comparison could be conducted and the impact of the LRD on LCOE could be identified.
Results
It was found that the direct impact of the LRD on the Baseline projects is approx. 50% CAPEX reduction in the mooring & anchoring component. Depending on the target LCOE, this translates to a decrease in LCOE of between 3.6% and 3.7%. When combining the indirect impacts, it was found that the LRD could further reduce LCOE by between 2.4% and 3.4%.
The combined reductions may in turn contribute to a total LCOE reduction of between 6.1% and 7.0%, or an equivalent saving of between 9.2M€ and 4.5M€ per 10MW device.
For more information on Dublin Offshore visit: dublinoffshore.ie
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