Chris Amos will present his recent experience supporting an offshore wind farm feasibility licence application. He will provide an overview of the development and construction tasks for an offshore wind farm, as well as describing challenges he experienced with respect to supply chain, ports, challenges with connection to grid and workforce skills required. Offshore wind is about to take off in the next few years in Australia. Applications for feasibility licences (the exclusive legal right to assess the feasibility of the site) just closed at the end of April 2023 for the first declared area in Australia, off the coast of Gippsland in Victoria. More declared areas are expected in the next couple of years. The scale of these wind farms is impressive, with a standard size of 2 GW almost becoming the standard base size; turbine heights are expected to run up to 250 m at blade peak height. Why does the Bass coast represent some of the best offshore wind opportunity in the world? It has high quality wind resources providing capacity factors around 50%. Water depths around the 60 m mark, allow for more affordable fixed-bottom installations. But what does this mean for the rest of Australia? The supply chain for offshore wind into Australia is not developed, the ports infrastructure currently does not support construction and the workforce does not yet exist. In addition, the grid to connect offshore wind needs to be built (Gippsland is a case in point). What needs to be done to resolve these challenges? He will also compare the benefits of offshore wind compared with onshore wind.

In this presentation you will learn about: 
1. the vessels used to install turbines, towers and jacket structures 
2. offshore substations 
3. inter-array cables and export cable systems
 

About the Speakers