R&D project

FLOATECH

Increasing the technical maturity and the cost competitiveness of floating offshore wind.


FLOATECH is a Horizon 2020 project funded under the Energy programme. The consortium is coordinated by TU Berlin and implemented by 9 partners from 4 EU countries.

FLOATECH aims at increasing the technical maturity and the cost competitiveness of floating offshore wind energy. This will be achieved by two types of actions.

  • The development, implementation and validation of a user-friendly and efficient design engineering tool (named QBlade-Ocean) performing simulations of floating offshore wind turbines with unseen aerodynamic and hydrodynamic fidelity. The more advanced modelling theories will lead to a reduction of the uncertainties in the design process and an increase of turbine efficiency.
  • The development of two innovative control techniques (i.e. Active Wave-based feed-forward Control and the Active Wake Mixing) for Floating Wind Turbines and floaters, combining wave prediction and anticipation of induced platform motions. This is expected to reduce the wake effects in floating wind farms, leading to a net increase in the annual energy production of the farm.

BW Ideol is mainly involved in the experimental offshore testing and validation (WP3). In particular, we are responsible for installing a wave prediction system, including a X-band radar, on Floatgen in order to capture the evolution of wave field surrounding the FWT. We also supervise operations and collect onsite data over the course of the project.

Read more about the project

Our news

Corporate and projects updates

DNV certification

Damping Pool® floating foundation for Buchan Offshore Wind receives DNV Basic Design Certification

After the certification of BW Ideol's standard 15MW+ platform in 2025, DNV has now certified the design developed specifically for Buchan Offshore Wind's North Sea site.

Read more

Illustrative Projection of a Concrete Floating Foundations Fabrication Line by BW Ideol in Ardesier ; credit BW Ideol

BW Ideol secures first public sector backing for its Ardersier floating foundation factory

Highlands and Islands Enterprise has approved more than £778,000 in Scottish Government funding to support the front-end engineering design study for BW Ideol's planned floating foundation manufacturing facility at the Port of Ardersier.

Read more

Parc éolien flottant Eolmed équipé des fondations Damping Pool® de BW Ideol - crédit BW Ideol

BW Ideol and NGE join forces in the Mediterranean

The two groups partner equally on Fos3F, BW Ideol's floating foundation factory project in France

Read more
All our news