In ELICAN, a strong team of complementary European companies with worldwide leading presence in the Wind Energy industry join forces to provide the market with a disruptive high-capacity and cost-reducing integrated substructure system for deep offshore wind energy. The technology is exceptionally fitted to meet the technical and logistical challenges of the sector as it moves into deeper locations with larger turbines, while allowing for drastic cost reduction. This project will design, build, certify and fully demonstrate in operative environment a deep water substructure prototype supporting Adwen’s 5MW offshore wind turbine, the be installed in the Southeast coast of Las Palmas (Canary Islands). It will become the first bottom-fixed offshore wind turbine in all of Southern Europe and the first one worldwide to be installed with no need of heavy-lift vessels. The revolutionary substructure consists in an integrated self-installing precast concrete telescopic tower and foundation that will allow for crane-free offshore installation of the complete substructure and wind turbine, thus overcoming the constraints imposed by the dependence on heavy-lift vessels. It will allow for a full inshore preassembly of the complete system, which is key to generate a highly industrialized low-cost manufacturing process with fast production rates and optimized risk control. The main benefits to be provided by this ground-breaking technology are: • Significant cost reduction (>35%) compared with current solutions. • Direct scalability in terms of turbine size, water depth, infrastructure and installation means. • Complete independence of heavy-lift vessels • Excellently suited for fast industrialized construction. • Robust and durable concrete substructure for reduced OPEX costs and improved asset integrity. • Suitable for most soil conditions, including rocky seabeds. • Enhanced environmental friendliness regarding both impact on sea life and carbon footprint.

Emerging technologies as Offshore Wind Energy, demand new advanced solutions for reducing Operation & Maintenance (O&M) costs, as well as for performing the reliability and extended life-time of wind turbines (WT) and farms (WF). In this sense, ROMEO is a 5 years project whose main objective is to develop and demonstrate an O&M information management and analytics platform capable of improving the decision making processes of offshore WF operators allowing the transition from calendar base maintenance to condition-based maintenance strategies reducing significantly O&M costs. Thus, a flexible and interoperable IoT platform will provide an advanced analytics ecosystem to better understand the real time behaviour of the main components of the WTs under operation conditions; maximizing their life-time and reducing the need for maintenance, thus minimizing the OPEX which drastically impact on LCoE of offshore Wind Energy. The project has been structured in three phases: 1st phase “specifications” will pave the way for other phases, defining the specifications and requirements in order to develop a health monitoring strategy for the most relevant and critical components to be further considered. -nd phase “models/tools/database” will be devoted to the development of health monitoring systems, diagnosis and prognosis tools for failure detection both at WTG components and support structures level, feeding the development of a data acquisition and advanced analytics ecosystem. 3rd phase “O&M/rollout” will develop and deploy an O&M platform to be validated in three pilot scenarios, data that will serve as input for impact assessment with a special focus on LCoE and replicability. ROMEO consortium is formed by a well-balanced set of experts (12 entities from 7 countries) representing the whole offshore value chain (from WT components manufacturers and service providers through to WF operators) together with IT market leaders, thus ensuring that results will reach the market.

In order to unlock the full potential of Europe’s offshore resources, network infrastructure is urgently required, linking off-shore wind parks and on-shore grids in different countries. HVDC technology is envisaged but the deployment of meshed HVDC offshore grids is currently hindered by the high cost of converter technology, lack of experience with protection systems and fault clearance components and immature international regulations and financial instruments. PROMOTioN will overcome these barriers by development and demonstration of three key technologies, a regulatory and financial framework and an offshore grid deployment plan for 2020 and beyond. A first key technology is presented by Diode Rectifier offshore converter. This concept is ground breaking as it challenges the need for complex, bulky and expensive converters, reducing significantly investment and maintenance cost and increasing availability. A fully rated compact diode rectifier converter will be connected to an existing wind farm. The second key technology is an HVDC grid protection system which will be developed and demonstrated utilising multi-vendor methods within the full scale Multi-Terminal Test Environment. The multi-vendor approach will allow DC grid protection to become a “plug-and-play” solution. The third technology pathway will first time demonstrate performance of existing HVDC circuit breaker prototypes to provide confidence and demonstrate technology readiness of this crucial network component. The additional pathway will develop the international regulatory and financial framework, essential for funding, deployment and operation of meshed offshore HVDC grids. With 35 partners PROMOTioN is ambitious in its scope and advances crucial HVDC grid technologies from medium to high TRL. Consortium includes all major HVDC and wind turbine manufacturers, TSO’s linked to the North Sea, offshore wind developers, leading academia and consulting companies.