Naval architecture and marine engineering consultant firm Glosten has won the second phase of the U.S. Department of Energy’s FLoating Offshore Wind ReadINess (FLOWIN) Prize for PelaStar, its tension-leg platform technology, the Seattle-based company announced May 15.
PelaStar is among five winning technologies that the DOE highlighted as “viable for industrialized manufacturing and deployment of gigawatt-scale offshore wind farms” in the country, according to Glosten.
The FLOWIN contest was created to accelerate the development of floating offshore wind supply chain solutions that could help advance the country’s decarbonization efforts.
In Phase One, companies had to show that their technologies were developed enough to justify industrialization and could be viably produced and deployed.
Phase Two called for adapting designs for serial production, show plans to produce and deploy the tech to mass scale and “prepare a cost estimate and production throughput analysis for deployment of a utility-scale floating wind farm,” according to the announcement.
PelaStar collaborated with Everett Floating Structures, FibreMax, Avient-Dyneema, GMC Limited, Triton Anchor, Havfram, Foss Offshore Wind, Geodis, TRC, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on a deployment plan, which would involve a weekly assembly and installation of one 15MW floating wind turbine beginning in early 2030s.
In Phase Three, PelaStar is to move forward on location-specific supply chain plans. The final prize is $900,000.
