Taliarte (Gran Canaria) (EFE).- The X30 floating wind turbine prototype that is being tested in the offshore test field of the Canary Islands Oceanic Platform (Plocan), off the coast of Gran Canaria, has produced the first kilowatt/hour generated in Spain by a wind system of these characteristics.
This device from the Spanish company X1 Wind already supplies electricity to the Plocan network and thus begins the testing phase to validate the platform in real operating conditions before the commercial deployment of this technology, which also includes an innovative development in the anchors , more respectful of the background.
At a press conference, the CEO of X1 Wind, Álex Raventos, highlighted the innovation provided by the vertical TLP mooring, which reduces the environmental footprint of the platform that supports the wind turbine and improves the compatibility of the space with other uses such as fishing, since it requires a surface area of 20 by 20 meters while the traditional ones need between 800 and 1,000 meters.
In addition, the platform passively orients itself with the wind when rotating around an anchor point, which, on the one hand, reduces costs and, on the other, provides better scalability than other systems that are fixed.
The design allows for turbines of more than 15 megawatts, each capable of powering 20,000 homes.
This technology, which has already proven its viability, “is very suitable” for seabeds such as the Canary Islands, because the anchoring system with vertical lines “also allows it to be anchored in deeper waters”, such as those that surround the islands.
The Canary Islands, Raventos pointed out, have “ideal conditions for offshore wind, as well as exceptional wind, the best in Europe” which can reduce generation costs.
And its ports also already have “a specialized supply chain that has historically worked in the maintenance of oil platforms and that can be converted,” he added.
Within this project, work has been done “with more than 40 Canarian companies, out of a total of 100 national companies”, which is “proof that there really is a supply chain and now it would be necessary to scale up and that there are commercial projects to that these companies can invest and increase their capacity”, pointed out Raventos.
The director of the Plocan, José Joaquín Hernández Brito, has highlighted the “exciting time” that we are currently experiencing, of transition in the way of producing energy and the opportunity to take advantage of the energy of seeing in the marine environment.
“You only need to develop the technologies and not depend on the outside” and, in this challenge, he said, “we are in luck” because “a Spanish technology with Spanish, young and dynamic companies, has obtained European financing and has managed to successfully install the prototype and demonstrate that this technology is viable”.
The Canary Islands, remarked the director of this unique scientific facility in Spain, “can play the role of a European test bench for all kinds of renewable technology.”
Hernández Brito celebrated the “success of Spanish technology”, which means advancing in “not depending technologically on the outside, because it is as bad to depend on energy as it is to depend on technology”, as well as the milestone reached by demonstrating that “in the Canary Islands energies can be used in a sustainable, ecological and efficient way in compatibility with other uses of the marine environment in deep waters and sufficiently far from the coast”.
Gran Canaria is home to the only one of the six high-potential marine areas for wind energy defined by the Ministry of Ecological Transition that the Government of the Canary Islands intends to develop, due to the synergies that it hopes these parks will find with the clean energy mass storage system The Salto de Chira pumping station is already under construction on the island. EFE