Hywind Tampen is the world’s first floating wind farm built specifically to power offshore oil and gas installations, and is now supplying electricity to Equinor’s oil and gas fields Snorre and Gullfaks in the Norwegian North Sea.
With a system capacity of 88 MW it is also the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm and an important step forward in industrialising solutions and reducing costs for future offshore wind power projects.
With Hywind Tampen now operational, Equinor is now operating nearly half (47 percent) of the world’s offshore floating wind capacity.
Hywind Tampen will be a test bed for further development of floating wind, exploring the use of new and larger turbines, installations methods, simplified moorings, concrete substructures and integration between gas and wind power generation systems.
The floating wind farm consists of 11 wind turbines which have been upgraded from 8 to 8.6 MW. Although the export system capacity and the platforms have not been upgraded accordingly, the increased capacity should contribute to an increased overall yearly production due to increased uptime. Operational experience will also contribute to improving the production capacity through increased utilisation rate.
The wind farm is estimated to meet about 35% of the annual electricity power demand of the five Snorre A and B, and Gullfaks A, B and C platforms. In periods with higher wind speeds this percentage will be significantly higher.
The wind power solution will help reduce the use of gas turbine power for the Snorre and Gullfaks offshore fields, while also offsetting 200,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions and 1,000 tonnes of NOx emissions per year.
Together with our partners in the Snorre and Gullfaks fields, we reached a final investment decision (FID) in October 2019 and awarded key contracts for the NOK 5 billion project in the same month.
The Hywind Tampen project
The project will contribute to further developing floating offshore wind technology and reducing the cost of future floating offshore wind farms, offering new industrial opportunities for Norway, the fields and the Norwegian supplier industry in a growing global offshore wind market.
- Hywind Tampen partners: Equinor, Petoro, OMV, Vår Energi, Wintershall Dea and INPEX Idemitsu Norge AS
- Total system capacity: 88 MW
- Location: About 140 km off the Norwegian coast
- Water depth between 260 and 300 metres
- Installed on floating concrete spar structures with a shared anchoring system
- The wind turbines will be connected in a 2.5 km-long inter-array network with a capacity of 66 kV
- Commenced producing power in the third quarter of 2022 and in full operation as of summer 2023
