EU awards SATHScale floating wind project with € 2.4 million

The European Commission has awarded Saitec Engineering with € 2.4 million funding under the Blue Economy Window call.

The funding will support the SATHScale project in bringing to market the SATH floating wind technology through scaling-up the prototype from the technology validation and demonstration to Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) required for commercial products in the relevant markets.

Saitec already put its 1:6 BlueSATH prototype to test in El Abra del Sardinero back in August, with the prototype completing its testing campaign in operational and extreme scenarios.

The SATHScale project aims to bring the technology to industrial readiness and maturity for market introduction, exploiting real experiences of the ongoing open-sea 2 MW demonstrator, DemoSATH, to be deployed at the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP) in Biscay, Spain.

The company said prefabrication was one of the main advantages of this technology and the project will therefore focus on the development of an industrialized fabrication system for mass production, covering the manufacturing process, transportation, installation, commissioning, O&M and dismantling of the floating wind platform.  

Furthermore, the design optimisation in terms of cost and dynamic behaviour is one of the key points for SATHScale, with the data gathered in real conditions and checking it against the values obtained through conservative calculation to inform the design processes.

“Risk reduction of the technology innovations and reducing unplanned activities, improving health and safety, and reducing costs will be achieved by the optimization of operations and maintenance logistics data and analytics of DemoSATH”, Saitec said.