High operating efficiencies combined with the major benefit of greater flexibility on location could be big advantages for floating offshore wind.

The world’s first commercial floating offshore wind farm, called Hywind, started sending electricity to the grid last October. Since then, the six-turbine, 30MW installation has been working well. Really well. In fact, Hywind has had a 65-percent capacity factor over the last three months according to Statoil, the Norwegian mega-corporation that built the wind farm off the coast of Scotland.

(Capacity factor measures a generation unit’s actual output against its theoretical maximum output. A capacity factor of 100 percent means the wind farm would be sending 30MW of power to the grid every minute of every day since it has been in operation.)

Cost of wind keeps dropping, and there’s little coal, nuclear can do to stop it

Hywind’s capacity factor exceeds the average capacity factors of many sources of electricity. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), onshore wind installations in the US had an average capacity factor of about 36.7 percent in 2017. Solar photovoltaic installations had an average capacity factor of 27 percent in 2017. Even conventional hydropower only has an average capacity factor of 45.2 percent. Click here to read more