Calling for entries from companies and consortia interested in undertaking a study to compare and de-risk fishbone and star cable topologies for floating offshore wind farms by evaluating their advantages, disadvantages, components, scalability, failure modes, maintenance, protocols, and overall performance in terms of time and cost.

In a daisy chain layout for floating offshore wind farms, turbines are connected in series, with each turbine linked to the next. While this configuration is the most feasible with existing technology, it introduces a potential vulnerability: a failure in one turbine or cable can disrupt the entire chain, affecting the electrical power export of multiple turbines.

This issue is compounded by the current need to tow turbines to port for maintenance and repair, which is both time-consuming and costly. This vulnerability underscores the importance of having robust and resilient electrical architectures to minimise downtime and ensure continuous power generation.

The main objectives of this work are to:

• Gain a holistic understanding of advantages and disadvantages of the fishbone and star cable topologies (or architectures, layouts) and how they compare to the traditional daisy chain approach.
• Evaluate the constituent technologies of each topology and their scalability.
• Analyse the potential failure modes and understand the maintenance protocols.
• Determine which topology performs best in terms of time and cost over the wind farm’s lifetime.
• Understand the gaps to qualification, and ultimately de-risking the technology.

The deadline for clarification questions is 28 March 2025.

The closing date to receive tender submissions is 18 April 2025.

All clarification questions and tender submissions should be sent electronically, by their respective deadlines to karolina.zieba@carbontrust.com, with floatingwind@carbontrust.com in copy.