The National Floating Wind Innovation Centre (FLOWIC)

The National Floating Wind Innovation Centre (FLOWIC) has been opened in a collaboration between ORE Catapult and ETZ Limited. Located within the Altens Industrial Estate and as part of Aberdeen’s Energy Transition Zone (ETZ). This also contains Aberdeen’s new £420 million deep water harbour. The new FLOWIC centre hopes to promote the development of floating offshore offshore wind technology. It provides advanced development facilities for other companies in the energy sector to use to develop future offshore wind generation technologies. Through the ScotWind Leasing process an estimated 19GW (Gigawatts) is likely to be coming available in the next few years through the transfer of skills and knowledge from the oil and gas industry to offshore wind generation.

                               Purpose of the FLOWIC Facility

The North East of Scotland has at present 75% of the world’s subsea engineering capability and a planned floating wind power capacity of 14.6GW(Gigawatts). It is hoped that the FLOWIC facility will greatly increase these figures in the future. At the present time the two existing projects off the Scottish coast represent more than a third of global installed capacity. These existing projects are the 50MW(Megawatt)  Kincardine wind farm off Aberdeen and the 30MW(Megawatt) Hywind Scotland project off the coast of Peterhead.