Concrete Support Structures for Offshore Wind Turbines: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Trends
Review article, 2021

Today’s offshore wind turbine support structures market is largely dominated by steel structures, since steel monopiles account for the vast majority of installations in the last decade and new types of multi-leg steel structures have been developed in recent years. However, as wind turbines become bigger, and potential sites for offshore wind farms are located in ever deeper waters and ever further from the shore, the conditions for the design, transport, and installation of support structures are changing. In light of these facts, this paper identifies and categorizes the challenges and future trends related to the use of concrete for support structures of future offshore wind projects. To do so, recent advances and technologies still under development for both bottom-fixed and floating concrete support structures have been reviewed. It was found that these new developments meet the challenges associated with the use of concrete support structures, as they will allow the production costs to be lowered and transport and installation to be facilitated. New technologies for concrete support structures used at medium and great water depths are also being developed and are expected to become more common in future offshore wind installations. Therefore, the new developments identified in this paper show the likelihood of an increase in the use of concrete support structures in future offshore wind farms. These developments also indicate that the complexity of future support structures will increase due to the development of hybrid structures combining steel and concrete. These evolutions call for new knowledge and technical know-how in order to allow reliable structures to be built and risk-free offshore installation to be executed.

wind energy

trends

concrete structures

foundations

offshore wind

support structures

Author

Alexandre Mathern

NCC AB

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering

Christoph von der Haar

grbv Ingenieure im Bauwesen GmbH & Co. KG

Steffen Marx

Technische Universität Dresden

Energies

1996-1073 (ISSN) 19961073 (eISSN)

Vol. 14 7 1995

Sustainable and Cost Effective Structural Supporting System for Onshore Wind Power Plants

Swedish Wind Power Technology Center (SWPTC), 2019-09-01 -- 2022-12-31.

ISEAWIND – Innovative Structural Engineering Approaches for design of off-shore WIND power plant foundations

NCC AB (SWPTCTG4-21), 2015-08-01 -- 2018-09-30.

Swedish Energy Agency, 2015-08-01 -- 2018-09-30.

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Innovation and entrepreneurship

Areas of Advance

Building Futures (2010-2018)

Production

Energy

Subject Categories

Energy Engineering

Civil Engineering

Geotechnical Engineering

Construction Management

Ocean and River Engineering

Infrastructure Engineering

Energy Systems

Building Technologies

Marine Engineering

DOI

10.3390/en14071995

More information

Latest update

6/7/2022 1