EWEA OFFSHORE to See LEANWIND Project Update

Gavin and Doherty Geosolutions Ltd. (GDG) and ACCIONA Infrastructures will present some preliminary findings from LEANWIND during the EWEA OFFSHORE 2015 event in Copenhagen.

The paper will address the global performance of various existing concepts of gravity based foundations in terms of buoyancy and stability.

The LEANWIND project, which started in December 2013, is an EU-funded applied research project with the main objective of reducing the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) from offshore wind, by facilitating the industrial application of the innovative concepts with cost-saving potentials across the whole supply chain.

The first three deliverables of the LEANWIND project, providing insight to the state of practice and anticipated developments in the offshore wind supply chain, have been issued in 2014 and are now publicly available at the project’s official website.

The second annual General Assembly of the project was held from 19th to 21st November 2014 at the University of Hull, UK. The meeting received a very good participation, with representatives attending from all the 31 academic and industrial partners of the LEANWIND project, from across Europe. The main focus of the meeting was to discuss the progress made during 2014, as well as setting directions for the upcoming activities and identifying the technical interfaces between the 10 Work-Packages involved, with the aim of devising optimised integration strategies.

Considering the inter-dependencies of Work-Packages, a two-day workshop will be held in January 2015, where selected representatives from the technical and modelling work-packages will attempt to maximise integration of activities and ensure compatibility of the work stream across the distinct disciplines. Gavin and Doherty Geosolutions Ltd. (GDG) will participate in this workshop as the leader of Work-Package 2 (WP2) on ‘’Construction, Deployment and Installation’’.

WP2 aims at performing a systematic investigation of the novel foundation concepts and evaluating their efficiency and limits in response to the challenging industry requirements that are expected in the near future. Work is currently undergoing on optimising the three most common foundation types employed for offshore wind, XL monopiles, jacket structures and gravity based foundations.

Press release; Image: GDG