海上风电安装船短缺风险：涡轮机越大，可用船只越少

This is Kamala Shelling and you're listening to Switched on the Bloomberg NEF podcast. Offshore wind turbines are getting bigger, a lot bigger. Average capacity for these turbines has more than doubled in the last 10 years, and expanded capacity means that the equipment is getting taller and heavier. Just how tall? Benefit expects that turbine hub heights could surpass 160 m by the end of the decade. That's taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza and twice the height of the Taj Mahal.

Needless to say, installing these massive wind farms is no trivial feat. And as turbines and the foundations they stand on get bigger, the number of vessels capable of installing this critical piece of energy infrastructure is shrinking fast. Today, I'm joined by Kaisa Jernets from BNF's offshore wind team to discuss her note, wind installation vessels. You're going to need a bigger boat. That title tells part of the story.

Vessel size is indeed a problem. But as we discussed, there's so much more to it than that. How stable the vessel is in turbulent seas. how quickly it can travel from one point to another, whether or not it can be easily retrofitted, and even its history working on other energy related projects all play a role. We also don't know just how much bigger turbines could get. A vessel crunch is almost certainly on the horizon, even if heights plateau.

But the problem could be 40 times as big if turbines keep growing the way BNF thinks they might. To bring you this story, Kaisa has modeled no fewer than 60,000 theoretical projects to see how vessel availability could impact offshore wind build in the next few years. BNF clients can find Kaisa's note and other research by heading to BNF wind go on the Bloomberg terminal or at bnf.com. If you'd like to learn more about how BNF approaches strategy research on the energy transition, including developments in commodity markets, trends across different sectors, and the cross cutting technologies shaping the future, you can find more information on bnf.com.

And if you'd like to speak with a member of our team about becoming a client, email us at sales.bnf [music] bloomberg.net. But for now, let's talk about offshore wind vessels with Kaiso. [music] Welcome to switched on Kaisa.

Thank you Kamela.

So a few years ago I was talking to somebody who'd been spending a lot of time in Dubai and this was really at the height of Dubai's uh skyscraper building. They were building the bridge Dubai now bridge Khalifa etc. And he told me that the skyscraper buildout in Dubai was so intense that really the limit was the number of cranes available in the world. Now, I've since gone back and looked up this anecdote, and reality, as it always is, is a little more nuance.

It had to do with crane weight times and the like, but it was actually true that one of the major sticking points for buildout in Dubai was availability of cranes. And it always stuck with me that the limiting factor here was not human ingenuity or engineering or even gravity, but just this piece of infrastructure that you need to put things where they need to go. And it feels like offshore wind. It's entering its Dubai skyscraper moment.

So start by telling us what is this problem that you are investigating in this note you just published.

Yes. So uh in a way I guess the offshore wind sector is reaching its Dubai moment. To install offshore wind farms you need massive boats that can lift the foundations as well as the turbines that go on top of the foundations. And on the demand side offshore wind is set for a big boom in the coming years. Last year, we installed 2.9 gawatt of offshore wind. And this year, it's set to be almost triple that outside mainland China.

And on the supply side of things, the fleet of vessels that can install these offshore wind farms is actually shrinking because turbines are getting heavier and bigger. So, the turbines are actually getting bigger. So, it's not just that we're putting more turbines in the water, so there's not enough boats to do it. It's actually that as the turbines get bigger, there are fewer and fewer boats that are capable of doing it.

Is that right?

Correct. Yes. So, what exactly do these boats have to be able to do to install a wind turbine? There are two different types of boats. One is called jackup vessels and they what they do is they go out at sea and then they literally stand on the seabed. Um they have four feet and they stand up and that means that they're very stable and they can install turbines. They can also install foundations. And there's a different type of boat which doesn't have legs just like a normal vessel.

And that one is more suitable for installing foundations. And what's the difference between a foundation and a turbine? I have sort of an intuitive sense, but can you actually spell out what's going into those two different pieces?

Yeah, the foundation is the part that you drill into the seabed and that the turbine sits on top of. And the turbine is the sort of technical equipment that actually generates electricity. So that's the blades, the rotor, the nel and the tower.

Okay. So the tower is the long piece that goes up

on top of the foundation.

On top of the foundation. The blades are the parts that spin and capture the wind. And the nasel is the piece that goes between the tower and the blades and holds the blades to the tower. Is that right?

You got it.

Okay. Fantastic. So these turbines are getting bigger and bigger. the number of boats that can actually install them is getting smaller. How big are these turbines getting?

Well, we don't really know. Uh over the past decade, they have doubled in size, but recently new turbine uh announcements have come to a bit of a standstill because these ever growing turbines are putting pressure on uh ports. They're putting pressure on the vessels and they have also been putting pressure on the turbine manufacturers themselves because they're not reaching economies of scale. And what we have done in this report is we've modeled two different scenarios.

One where turbines continue to grow as they have been in the past decade and one where turbine growth stagnates and they remain at 15 megawatt which is uh currently the biggest installed commercialized turbine outside mainland China. So what exactly do these two scenarios say about the outlook for vessels in the coming years? For turbine installation, it makes a huge difference whether turbines continue to grow or not.

If they continue to grow, more than 30 gawatt of installations are at risk of not finding a suitable vessel simply because they are too heavy and too big for the existing fleet to lift. And if they remain at the current size, that number drops to 750 megawatt, which is a very small amount in comparison. So that's a 40 time difference.

Yeah. The if they continue to grow, that's 27% of the installations that we're expecting to see up to 2035.

That is an absolutely monstrous difference. So this is not like, oh, we're seeing a little bit of a difference between the two. We're seeing like night and day.

Yeah. No, it really makes a very big difference for the industry. But when it comes to foundations, the supply demand balance is going to be tight either way. Foundations continue to grow even if turbines do not because developers are moving into deeper waters as all of the nearshore areas are already occupied by existing wind farms. And that means that foundations have to get taller and they have to get heavier. So even if turbines do not grow, we are expecting this to be a very tight market.

Amazing. So, as the subtitle of your note says, we are definitely going to need bigger boats and we're also going to need more boats. How exactly do you go about assessing just how many boats we're going to need? What is the methodology you go through? What can I say? I like big boats and I cannot [laughter] lie. Uh what we have done is we've created for