Norway opens world’s largest floating offshore wind farm… to pump up oil

On Wednesday, Norway opened the world’s first floating wind farm explicitly built to power offshore oil and gas installations and is now supplying electricity to oil and gas fields Snorre and Gullfaks in the Norwegian North Sea – 140 km off the Norwegian coast. Crown Prince Haakon of Norway gave the symbolic green light by connecting two cables.

The ‘Hywind Tampen’, as the facility is called, will supply electricity to five oil and gas platforms in the North Sea to reduce their CO2 emissions. According to the oil and gas company Equinor, which heads the project, this is expected to save 200 000 tons of CO2 and 1 000 tons of NOx emissions annually. It is, of course, only peanuts compared to the emissions the pumped-up oil and gas will produce.

Hywind Tampen

Hywind Tampen is the first facility of its kind in Norway. It consists of 11 floating wind turbines. The wind farm cost 694 million euros (7,4 billion crowns) and first produced electricity in November 2022.

With a system capacity of 88 MW, it is also the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm and is expected to cover about 35% of the annual need for electricity on the Snorre A and B, and Gullfaks A, B, and C platforms. It is essential in industrializing solutions and reducing costs for future offshore wind power projects.

Hywind Tampen will be a test bed for further development of floating offshore wind technology, exploring new and larger turbines, installation methods, simplified moorings, concrete substructures, and integration between gas and wind power generation systems.