US Students Testing Deepwater Floating Offshore Wind Platforms for Wind Turbines in Netherlands {VIDEO}

Here’s a fun one. The project itself is interesting and looks very useful, but the most interesting thing, in my opinion, is checking out the facility and a little bit of the testing in the video above. (Maybe I’m just a cleantech geek, though.)

Here’s a little more on the project, from Wind Today:

University of Maine engineering students and researchers working at a facility in the Netherlands are now into the third week of testing scale models of deepwater floating offshore wind platforms for wind turbines.

The team from UMaine’s AEWC Advanced Structures and Composites Center, is testing 1/50th-scale models at an offshore wind basin owned by a Dutch company called Marin. Three different types of floating platforms are being tested 16 hours a day and are being subjected to different wind and wave intensity levels that mimic conditions in the Gulf of Maine in side-by-side comparison tests.

The testing will go on for 6 weeks and the results so far are reportedly what the engineering students expected, according to graduate research assistant at the Advanced Structures and Composites Center Heather Martin. Heather designed the prototype blades and turbine and just returned from a two-week trip to the facility in the Netherlands.

“The scaled-down model is an early part of Phase 1 of the Maine Deepwater Offshore Wind Plan, which aims by the year 2030 to have a commercial floating wind farm in the Gulf of Maine generating 5,000 megawatts of energy.”

As I just wrote a couple hours ago, offshore wind technology is being improved more and more in order to lower the costs of offshore wind power projects, and an offshore wind power boom in on the horizon….