Salamander Floating Wind

The Salamander project will harness the offshore wind potential of the North Sea to help create a clean, sustainable future for everyone.

This project will utilise innovative and cutting-edge floating offshore wind technologies to produce zero-carbon electricity. The development aims to help Scotland and the UK as a whole to progress towards a net-zero future.

Salamander is a pre-commercial size project, up to 200MW capacity, located off Peterhead in the East coast of Scotland. Due to its privileged location, the project is currently exploring routes to market including oil and gas decarbonization and hydrogen production. The project is in an advanced planning stage and it is aiming to secure a Contracts for Difference (the government’s main mechanism for supporting low-carbon electricity generation) in 2025.

The Salamander project is a stepping-stone project that is following the philosophy that Simply Blue Energy is using in the Celtic Sea and therefore has a strong focus on supply chain development. Salamander will provide an opportunity for the local supply chain to gear up for commercial scale opportunities in Scotland, as well as de-risking floating wind technologies for the future commercial projects. This will allow Scotland to maximise the financial benefit of its strong offshore wind resource and generate long term jobs for its local communities while contributing to the UK government’s target of 1GW of operational floating offshore wind by 2030.

Floating wind foundations are normally used in deep waters where fixed foundations are no longer economically feasible. Space for fixed foundations is scarce in many countries (including the UK) as development of fixed wind projects has been happening for the last 15 years. WindEurope estimates 80% of the wind resource in Europe is in waters beyond 60m deep. Therefore, it is clear that floating wind is going to play a very important role in the development of offshore wind pipelines in many countries including Scotland.

Scotland is a pioneer in floating offshore wind having deployed the first floating array in the world, the Hywind Scotland project. In addition to this project, Kincardine Offshore Wind Farm Phase 1 and Phase 2 have recently been deployed bringing the combined capacity of floating offshore wind in Scotland to 80MW. The recently launched ScotWind commercial leasing round is underway in Scotland by which Crown Estate Scotland will grant property rights for seabed in Scottish waters for approximately 10GW of new commercial scale offshore wind project development. It is expected that some of these projects will use floating wind foundations with most of these becoming operational post 2030 and on a scale of circa 1GW each.

Given previous projects have not yielded the expected supply chain benefits for Scotland, there is a need for pre-commercial stepping-stone projects to get ready for ScotWind. The Salamander project aims to bridge the development gap between the current operational floating wind projects and ScotWind projects.