Tugdock and Sarens work together

4 May 2023

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UK startup works with world leading transport and lifting company in offshore wind sector.

A UK startup company by the name of Tugdock Limited, located in Cornwall, announced a partnership with Sarens to offer a novel solution. Lucas Lowe-Houghton, director of business development for Tugdock, explains: “The floating offshore wind sector is expected to continue to grow rapidly. However, very few of the world’s ports have sufficient water depth and assembly quay space to build the huge turbine floaters required, and conventional dry docks are not wide enough as they were originally designed for ships.” 

Tugdock’s patented marine buoyancy bag technology solves this issue. “It has been designed to help ports play a bigger role in floating offshore wind turbine assembly. It allows floating dry docks to be delivered by road in modular form and assembled at the port to dimensions far wider than most of the world’s existing dry docks. The floating platform is then towed to deeper water for launching of the turbines. Our submersible floating dry docks can operate with as little as five metres draft, enabling more efficient wind turbine floater construction.”

This technology can greatly increase the capacity of docks such as Pembroke Port, in Wales; a £60 million project is underway to adapt infrastructure there to accommodate the growing number of renewables developers who are seeking to base themselves there due to its proximity to the Celtic Sea, which has some of the best wind resources in Europe.

Simulations are under way of the processes of manoeuvring large floating wind turbines into, and out from, Pembroke Port using the Tugdock technology. These will give a detailed understanding of the sequence of events that need to take place to successfully complete these phases of turbine recovery and deployment and help steer future planning for the port.

“More than 8% of the total cost of a floating offshore wind farm is accounted for by assembly and installation” says Lucas.

“So any innovation that allows this process to be carried out more efficiently and quickly will have a big impact on profitability for developers.”

Carl Sarens director of global operations, technical solutions and engineering at Sarens, said: “Through this partnership with Tugdock we are able to streamline the solution we offer to developers. By significantly reducing time and costs our alliance will deliver a step change for wind turbine construction. In addition, Tugdock’s flexibility and reusability is useful to global developers as the units can be reused from one port or project to another regardless of changes in turbine size or foundation weight.”