Will it float? Meet the future of Asian wind power

The Asia-Pacific region has some of the deepest waters on earth – if you inverted Mount Everest and placed it in the Mariana Trench, it still wouldn't reach the bottom. In short, for South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, the already onerous task of anchoring a turbine on the seabed is even harder.

This hurdle can be overcome through floating offshore wind, where conventional turbines are housed on floating platforms in deep-sea areas. But it's not just a technical solution – the wind typically blows strongest where the sea is deepest. Floating wind is as much opportunity as necessity.

In October 2023, the Japanese Government announced four candidate areas for demo floating wind projects with around 30 megawatts (MW) per location. The developments have been supported by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Green Innovation Fund. Notes Lewis McDonald, Herbert Smith Freehills' global co-head of energy: "Japanese investors are active around the world, seeking to understand the technology so they can bring it back and deploy at scale."

South Korea, meanwhile, has abundant floating wind potential. The Global Wind Energy Council reckons the nation has 624 gigawatts (GW) of untapped technical offshore wind capacity, with a significant proportion of it floating. Developers are forecasting such potential will eventually be realised. According to wind developer Orsted, 20% of new offshore wind by the mid-2030s could be floating. Meanwhile, RWE is aiming to achieve 1GW of floating wind deployed or under construction by 2030 and at least 4GW of capacity deployed by 2035.

But, as with conventional offshore wind, challenges remain, with ramping up production in time to meet net zero targets looming largest among them. There are also concerns about how floating platforms will impact marine environments and local shipping and, perhaps most ominously, fears about how floating platforms could be defended as strategic assets should geopolitical tensions rise in the region.

Few doubt that floating wind represents the next step of offshore development, but as an emerging application requiring considerable engineering feats, the sector remains one of the industry's riskier propositions.