Posters

Abstract

To realize the full potential of floating offshore wind and support Europe’s Green Deal for climate neutrality by 2050, the industry must overcome challenges of performance, cost, and maturity through accelerated innovation, and industrialization. While today’s offshore wind market is shaped by bottom-fixed foundation practices, floating wind requires new approaches in grid connection and electrical infrastructure to drive competitiveness and improve energy security. This project addresses the need for a subsea-smart-hub-based inter-array cable (IAC) system architecture for floating wind farms, an alternative to the conventional “daisy-chain” configuration. The main objective is to establish a reliable design basis for 66 kV and 132 kV subsea-hub based IAC systems, focusing on fishbone and star architectures. A central ambition is to enable scaling of subsea-hub based IAC architectures with limited technical and commercial risk, ensuring solutions are viable for stakeholders across the supply chain, including cable suppliers, connection technology providers, and floating wind developers. The project also defines specifications for subsea smart hubs, including functional requirements, target reliability, and cost benchmarks, to guide industrial development and deployment. The project is structured into 4 work packages, covering system design, validation, and collaboration with developers and technology suppliers. Developers will provide insights into operational needs, help prioritize critical functionalities, and assess feasibility to ensure alignment with real-world project requirements. By advancing scalable, reliable, and cost-effective subsea-hub architectures, this project will de-risk adoption of subsea-smart-hub-based inter-array cable architectures. The results will benefit the entire value chain, from equipment suppliers to wind farm operators, and support the offshore wind sector in delivering Europe’s renewable energy and decarbonization targets.