A recent comparative study on levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) performed by the Irish techno-financial analyst, Exceedence shows that World Wide Wind’s counter-rotating vertical turbine (CRVT) technology can achieve more than 40% improvement on LCOE compared to other floating wind turbines.
Using available cost data from existing floating wind projects, as well as data from DNV and NREL a 480 MW floating wind farm at Utsira, Norway was modelled, comparing a steel and concrete spar design 15 MW horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT) with the 24 MW turbine design from World Wide Wind (WWW). The results from the study, using 2024-costs for all input factors were an LCOE of 124 €/MW and 111 €/MW for a HAWT steel and concrete spar design respectively, and 64 €/MW for the WWW turbine. The design characteristics of the turbine from WWW allows for scaling up significantly beyond 15 MW.
Bigger size per turbine means fewer cables and substations. Further, the turbines have fewer moving parts, as well as lower material costs. A recent analysis performed by 4Subsea also concluded that the WWW turbine can achieve equal capacity factor to the conventional solutions. Further, as the WWW turbines have a lower wake effect compared to the HAWT turbines, they can be placed closer together. Wake effects were however not taken into account in the LCOE-study.
WWW is targeting to launch a 24 MW turbine in the market before 2030.
