The WHEEL Consortium gathered last week for the 1 st General Assembly meeting of the WHEEL project. All partners including @2BEnergy, @Rover, @IHC, @EnbW, @Bridon, @Repnaval, @Boskalis, @Vicinay, @Cemex and @Plocan joined to this first meeting that took place in Madrid to follow up on the technical and coordination tasks developed in the different work packages during the first 6 months of the project.

The overall objective of the WHEEL project, funded by the European Commission through the Horizon Europe (GA 101084409), is to fully demonstrate and bring to a precommercial Technology Readiness Level (TRL) a revolutionary floating wind technology excellently suited for deep water locations, effective industrialization strategies, breakthrough cost reduction and minimized carbon footprint.

This shall enable a radical step forward for LCoE reduction, whilst also addressing scalability, harbour infrastructure suitability and availability, and the sustainability & circularity of floating offshore wind.

In this first GA meeting, Esteyco, as coordinator of the project and responsible for the design of the WHEEL prototype, explained the technical progress achieved during this first stage of the project. It also showed the partners some additional tank testing campaign carried out to assess the transport (tow-out), operation, UT alone (tow-in) and UT deballasted actions of the prototype with excellent results.

Actions in the following months were also defined and agreed by the Consortium who will continue working to contribute to reaching the European commitment of net zero emissions by 2050.