An introduction

WindSea AS is developing, testing and plans commercialize a new, innovative offshore wind turbine platform. WindSea is owned by FORCE Technology and NLI, both leading players in their respective fields.

WindSea is a new concept for offshore wind turbine platforms. The concept is beeing developed using the accumulated experience of the founders in the offshore industry. Issues particular to offshore wind turbine deployment such as fabrication, access, installation, and maintenance are effectively addressed by the WindSea design.

The WindSea concept consists of a floating platform supporting 3 wind mills.

The configuration of the platform is a semi-submersible vessel with 3 corner columns. Each column supports one wind turbine.

The semi-submersible vessel is moored to the sea bottom with the mooring lines connected to a turret at the vessel geometric center. This configuration allows the vessel to rotate. The vessel is therefore always able to orient the turbines optimally towards the incoming wind.

Due to the large diameters of the mills and the relative small dimension of the vessel, one of the mills will be partly in the shadow of the 2 others. To minimize this shadow effect the tower of the downwind mill is made higher.

The ability of the vessel to rotate, leads to the advantage that the turbines do not need a traditional yaw-system that allows them to rotate individually.This reduces cost.