Hywind Tampen: the world’s first renewable power for offshore oil and gas
Hywind Tampen is the world’s first floating wind farm built specifically to power offshore oil and gas installations, and is now supplying electricity to Equinor’s oil and gas fields Snorre and Gullfaks in the Norwegian North Sea.
With a system capacity of 88 MW it is also the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm and an important step forward in industrialising solutions and reducing costs for future offshore wind power projects.
With Hywind Tampen now operational, Equinor is now operating nearly half (47 percent) of the world’s offshore floating wind capacity.
Hywind Tampen will be a test bed for further development of floating wind, exploring the use of new and larger turbines, installations methods, simplified moorings, concrete substructures and integration between gas and wind power generation systems.
The floating wind farm consists of 11 wind turbines which have been upgraded from 8 to 8.6 MW. Although the export system capacity and the platforms have not been upgraded accordingly, the increased capacity should contribute to an increased overall yearly production due to increased uptime. Operational experience will also contribute to improving the production capacity through increased utilisation rate.
The wind farm is estimated to meet about 35% of the annual electricity power demand of the five Snorre A and B, and Gullfaks A, B and C platforms. In periods with higher wind speeds this percentage will be significantly higher.