Toward Efficient Infrastructure Development and Project Planning for Floating Offshore Wind Energy

The expectation of rapid growth in floating offshore wind farms (FOWFs) calls for urgent development of the associated supply chain. In this paper, we focus on the supply chain for floaters that relies on a sequence of activities including fabrication, transportation, assembly, and installation. As the intermediate stock of floaters is limited, irregular and unplanned suspension of operations that could arise due to unfavorable weather conditions would strongly influence the supply. Successful throughput in the supply chain results from the available infrastructure that defines the stock and flow capacity for each step in the project. The complexity of the interactions among the processes and the uncertainty in weather conditions pose a challenge in planning an efficient infrastructure development plan to meet the future demand of FOWFs. This study proposes a planning method that works by evaluating the performance of various configurations in such development using a stock-flow simulation model considering weather conditions. The model is validated to show good agreement with the installation process for an existing FOWF project. As a case study, we discuss infrastructure development for the Kyushu area in Japan, where results suggest several pathways to achieve desired performance.