©WHEEL The huge potential of floating marine wind energy needs no explanation. Being aware of this potential, the sector is booming with a multitude of ideas and concepts to overcome the difficulties that are inherent to exploring and conquering a whole new market to be exploited, and one that is a large and promising as it is complicated. Among this avalanche of solutions, only two so far have been taken out to sea in the form of pre-serial projects SPARs and SEMI-SUBS/BARGES. Although the general experience gained has been highly positive and encouraging, it is also true that all these solutions have considerable setbacks that are holding back their full commercial development and will only increase the restrictions on the next generation of marine wind turbines of more than 15 MW, which are those that will enable floating wind energy to be commercially viable.

©WHEEL technology(Wind Hybrid Esteyco Evolution for Low-Carbon Solutions)effectively solves these problems: a “spar”-type floating platform that has been developed to achieve an unprecedented reduction in the size of the floater, the depth of the port, the use of materials and the carbon footprint. The specific demonstration of ©WHEEL will be completed in 2025 with support from the Horizon Europe initiative, with a fully operational ©WHEEL FLOATER to be tested out at sea on a 6 MW turbine.