Offshore wind installation: Analysing the evidence behind improvements in installation time.

The most important single event of the last years in wind energy technology is the reduction in the cost of producing wind electricity offshore, a reduction that can reach 75%, depending on the system boundary considered, for installations commissioned by 2024. Surprisingly, there is very little scientific literature showing how this reduction is being achieved. The objective of this paper is to analyse the evidence behind cost reduction in one of the most significant cost elements of offshore wind farms, the installation of foundations and turbines. This cost is directly dependent on the daily rates of the installation vessels and on the days it takes to install those wind farm elements. Therefore, we collected installation data from 87 wind farms installed from 2000 to 2017, to establish the exact time for installation in each. The results show that advances have reached 70% reduction in installation times throughout the period for the whole set, turbine plus foundation. Most of these improvements (and the corresponding impact in reducing costs) relate to the larger size of turbines installed nowadays. There is, therefore, not any leap forward in the installation process, but only incremental improvements applied to turbines that are now four times as large as in 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]