Vårgrønn’s Massive UK Offshore Floating Wind Project

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast - A podcast by Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum & Phil Totaro

Categories:

In the Uptime Spotlight today is Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, the company building the world's largest offshore wind farm with a government contract: Green Volt. Stephen discusses the massive project's progress, planning, and logistics to be completed by 2030. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum today, I'm excited to welcome Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, who is leading the charge in developing some of Europe's most ambitious floating offshore wind projects. Stephen brings over 25 years of energy industry experience and currently oversees Vårgrønn's Impressive portfolio of projects across Northern Europe, including Greenvolt, set to become the world's largest floating offshore wind farm with a government contract. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Steven, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, great to be here. Well, the Greenvolt project is one of the most important Impressive projects going on in the world right now, and you're heavily involved with that, of course, as being the CEO of Vårgrønn and I want to understand a little bit about how that project came together and what problem Greenvolt is trying to solve. Stephen Bull: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's kind of neat to say it's the most exciting project. I think it's, uh, it's quite a scary project in many respects for us as well when you work within the offshore wind sector at the moment, but definitely within floating offshore wind. Yeah. If we sort of dial it back down to the project itself, I mean, what we're solving for here is, is the generic problem with offshore wind in deeper waters. And, uh, and really when you start to push the boundaries beyond 60, you know, 60 odd plus, 70 meter water depths, you need to start to go into the floating territory. Um, and that's something that you find distinctly within the coast of Scotland as well. There's only so much of that seabed that is shallow and then it starts to push out there. So, Scottish authorities, the Scottish Crown Estate, the guys who basically own the seabed license around there,