The DIFOWT Project

De-risking Ireland’s Floating Offshore Wind Targets

What is DIFOWT

The DIFOWT (De-Risking Ireland’s Floating Offshore Wind Targets) Project aims to address the challenges facing investment for Ireland’s ports, vessels and workforce requirements, while also helping to influence and expand the scope of policy frameworks for the growth of Ireland’s Floating Offshore Wind (FOW) sector. Some of the key infrastructural areas to target for investment include port and wet storage capacity, vessels, farm availability and LCOE sensitivity.

This investment challenge is a clear ‘bottleneck’ which had been identified by a previous SEAI RD&D funded project, SIMREI (Support Infrastructure for Marine Renewables in Ireland), which developed models of the installation, operation and maintenance of Floating offshore Wind Farms in Irish water. These models were then used to determine the required scale of port infrastructure and vessels to deliver Ireland’s goals for offshore wind capacity.

Offshore wind energy is expected to provide substantial renewable energy capacity for Ireland, including reaching 5 GW of ORE (offshore renewable energy) to be provided by 2030 and at least 37 GW by 2050.

• Project duration is January 2024 – December 2025.

• Contact us: research@windenergyireland.com

Project Objectives

The DIFOWT project aims to de-risk Ireland’s FOW sector to ensure its timely and economically viable development. To achieve this, the project will engage with stakeholders to identify and confirm current industry risks, use simulations to provide quantitative evidence of these risks’ impacts, and simulate the future development of FOW in Ireland up to 2050 to understand the broader implications for national targets.

Additionally, the project will disseminate evidence-based recommendations and outputs to stakeholders to mitigate risks and accelerate the development and commercialization of FOW in Ireland.

Project Outputs

The outputs of DIFOWT will de-risk Ireland’s FOW sector and be used to guide policy and leverage investment for port and infrastructure development as well as the procurement of appropriate vessels and the development of a skilled workforce.
 
This will lead to better software for FOW energy storage, improved energy capacity predictions for Ireland’s FOW sector, and a clearer understanding of the challenges in reducing risks in this sector and how to address them.
There will be additional project outputs throughout the duration of the project in the form of Project Updates, which will provide data from the modelling activities for the future use of FOW wind turbines in Irish waters, as well as news from monthly reports from the project partners.