An advantageous history
Scotland has a long history of developing floating systems with over 50 years of oil and gas heritage and innovation to our name. This expertise is now being put to further use in the floating offshore wind sector.
Scotland is a world leader in the deployment of floating wind and currently has two of the world's largest operational floating wind farms with two more now with planning permission. The Pentland 100MW project will become the world's largest operational wind farm but will then be superseded by the 560MW Green Volt project which will become the world's first commercial scale floating wind farm.
The announcement of the winning projects in the ScotWind and INTOG leasing rounds has added just over 24.4GW of demonstration and commercial scale floating wind to our pipeline making Scotland the largest floating wind market in the world. Details of all these projects can be found in this section.
Floating Wind Projects with Map
The project list and map below shows the current operational, development and pipeline floating wind projects in Scotland.
All of the related project developers and consortia are also given in the list against their specific wind farm developments. The bulk of these projects are from the ScotWind leasing round and this project list has grown larger with the addition of further floating wind farms from the INTOG or Innovation and Targeted Oil and Gas leasing round.
This has now added another 12 floating projects to this existing list with an additional capacity of up to 5.4GW. The successful bidders in this INTOG round are listed in our INTOG section of the web site.
Scottish Floating Wind Projects Map
*hover / touch to see more information
Floating wind - the big numbers
The headline figures for the Scottish market
Floating wind capacity in Scottish pipeline
Investment
Floating substructures
Floating wind projects in Scotland
Scotland is home to the two largest floating wind farms in the world, Hywind Scotland and the Kincardine Offshore Wind Farm. These will be joined by the Pentland Offshore Wind Farm which , when completed, will be the new largest in the world record holder
Equinor
Equinor
The world's first commercial floating wind project, Equinor's 30MW Hywind Scotland wind farm, commenced operations in 2017. It is situated about 25km off Peterhead, in the North East of Scotland, in water depths from 90m to 120m. It consists of five 6MW Siemens Gamesa turbines on spar type floating substructures which extend 78m below the surface.
In the first two years it set an average capacity factor of 54% and in the period from April 2019 to March 2020 it set a new UK record of 57.1%.
It’s great to see the results Hywind Scotland and the floating technology keeps delivering. The potential for floating offshore wind is huge. With access to deeper waters and therefore higher and more consistent wind speeds, floating offshore is not only an efficient way to generate electricity from wind, this exciting technology can also provide jobs and value creation for the countries supportive of floating. In the UK alone, we are talking at least 17000 jobs and £33bn GVA by 2050. We believe Scotland has the potential to build a globally competitive offshore wind industry, including a real chance to enhance the development of floating offshore wind.
Sebastian Bringsvaerd, Head of Floating Wind
Location: HQ, Norway
Business Size: Corporate multinational with 21,000 staff
Website: equinor.com/