Swedish floating wind technology developer Hexicon, through a 50/50 joint venture with its partner in Italy, has submitted an application to the Italian authorities for a concession for an offshore area in the Strait of Sicily, where the joint venture plans to build a gigawatt-scale floating wind farm.
AvenHexicon, the joint venture established by Hexicon and Bologna-based Avapa Energy, applied for a 30-year concession with the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility on 24 June.
Project plans were then put to public consultation on 1 August by the Port Authority of Porto Empedocle in Agrigento, off whose coast the floating wind farm would be built.
The project, named Sicily South, would have an installed capacity of 1.2 GW made up of 24 floaters installed in waters 34 kilometres from Porto Empedocle.
The floating wind platforms are based on Hexicon’s technology that uses one floating foundation and two wind turbines. In the case of the Sicily South project, the 24 floaters would carry 48 wind turbines, meaning each individual wind turbine would have an output of 25 MW.
Hexicon and Avapa Energy entered into a joint venture in December last year with an aim to jointly develop floating wind power projects in waters offshore Italy.
Upon announcing their partnership, the companies said that AvenHexicon would identify suitable sites for floating wind farms in order to initiate the necessary permit processes as quickly as possible and that the joint venture would adopt and promote the use of Hexicon’s patented technology.
The technology, a floating platform with two tilted towers that makes it possible to install two turbines on the same foundation, received a patent confirmation from the European Patent Office (EPO) in the fourth quarter of last year.
The company is currently working on the TwinWay pilot project in Norway, which will see the two-towered floater installed at MetCentre deep-water test site in 2023.
This will mark the first time that Hexicon’s two-turbine floating wind platform design is deployed at full scale and will serve for proof of concept to verify and commercialise its foundation technology, dubbed TwinWind.
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