NextFloat Project kick-off: the industrial deployment of floating wind

A pan-European project officially launched on November 18th in Paris to accelerate the roll out of the next generation of floating wind technology for a competitive, more scalable and industrial deployment.

The ambitious initiative is being led by a consortium of thirteen partners from eight countries including Technip Energies as project coordinator, X1Wind, Naturgy, 2B Energy, Hellenic Cables, Technical University of Denmark, Hydro, Ecole Centrale de Nantes, Schwartz Hautmont, Ocas, Tersan Shipyard, Ocean Ecostructures and Cybernetix.

Backed by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe program with public funding of 16M€, plus private funding from partners and shareholders, the project is anticipated to run until 2027.

The project will lead to the deployment of a 6MW floating wind prototype at the Mediterranean Sea, to demonstrate at a relevant scale an innovative integrated downwind floating platform design, while advancing in parallel on the industrialization and scaling-up of the integrated solution up to 20MW+ scale, in preparation of commercial floating wind farms under development in Europe.

This project builds upon previous European Projects such as the PivotBuoy which recently led to the installation of a part-scale prototype in the Canary Islands to validate the technology. Design work for the initial 6MW system is currently underway.