Haventus, Sarens PSG develop floating wind lift solution for use at Ardersier

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Haventus, Sarens PSG develop floating wind lift solution for use at Ardersier

Haventus, the owner of the Ardersier Port on the Moray Firth, has developed a new method to integrate and launch floating offshore wind turbines in partnership with Sarens PSG The heavy-lift solution aims to enable safe on-land integration of turbines and floating platforms, and to launch them into to the harbour. According to Haventus, it […]

Haventus, the owner of the Ardersier Port on the Moray Firth, has developed a new method to integrate and launch floating offshore wind turbines in partnership with Sarens PSG

The heavy-lift solution aims to enable safe on-land integration of turbines and floating platforms, and to launch them into to the harbour.

According to Haventus, it will help remove some of the operational, safety, logistical and engineering complexity that comes with storage and integration activities.

In addition, it will help drive down costs and accelerating floating wind deployment by simplifying transport and installation requirements and shortening supply chains.

Haventus chief executive Lewis Gillies said: “Industrialisation, innovation and scale are critical to creating meaningful employment and to driving down the cost of floating offshore wind to parity with fixed offshore wind, if not lower.

“These factors will put Scotland and the UK at the global forefront of FLOW. This heavy-lift solution, developed with Sarens PSG, is a radical departure from conventional practice; it will substantially reduce the cost of floating wind which ultimately can help reduce all of our electricity bills.”

Ardersier Port

Haventus has been redeveloping Ardersier Port, a former McDermotts oil and gas yard, into an energy transition facility (ETF).

Having been used in the 1970s and 1980s to build oil and gas platforms, the original facility closed its doors in 2001.

Quantum Capital Group pledged £300 million in 2023 to help the project, with both the Scottish National Investment Bank and UK Infrastructure Bank providing £50m each in credit facilities.

The redevelopment aims to turn Ardersier port into a “nationally significant” infrastructure facility to support industrial-scale deployment of fixed and floating offshore wind.

Haventus seeks to capitalise on the 28GW ScotWind projects and the UK’s wider ambition of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030.

Recently offshore wind developer Cerulean Winds chose Ardersier for as the hub for its 1GW Aspen floating wind farm in the Central North Sea,

The Ardersier ETF, at a current developable land area of 350 acres, with proposals to extend to around 500 acres, is one of the few European facilities large enough to provide a land-based solution for these activities.

Work on the facility is scheduled for completion this year.

Invergordon-based Sarens PSG was previously brought in to support work to build the port’s quay walls, which was completed last-year.

The company deployed a fleet of vehicles including eight crawler cranes to install the front quay and rear anchor walls.

Sarens PSG managing director Steve Clark added: “This is potentially a game-changing step for floating offshore wind. Industrial-scale deployment demands industrial-scale solutions and this partnership with Haventus can deliver exactly that.

“By executing all heavy lifting operations whilst the floater is still onshore, we’re enabling fully integrated wind turbines to be assembled and launched safely, efficiently, and independent of marine weather delays. This can be a milestone for Ardersier, with positive implications for the wider offshore wind industry.”

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Resetting net zero: What next?

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Check Point CISO: Network segregation can prevent blackouts, disruptions

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Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has taken a more aggressive approach to red teaming than its AI competitors, demonstrating its security teams’ advanced capabilities in two areas: multi-step reinforcement and external red teaming. OpenAI recently released two papers that set a new competitive standard for improving the quality, reliability and safety of AI models in these two techniques and more. The first paper, “OpenAI’s Approach to External Red Teaming for AI Models and Systems,” reports that specialized teams outside the company have proven effective in uncovering vulnerabilities that might otherwise have made it into a released model because in-house testing techniques may have missed them. In the second paper, “Diverse and Effective Red Teaming with Auto-Generated Rewards and Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning,” OpenAI introduces an automated framework that relies on iterative reinforcement learning to generate a broad spectrum of novel, wide-ranging attacks. Going all-in on red teaming pays practical, competitive dividends It’s encouraging to see competitive intensity in red teaming growing among AI companies. When Anthropic released its AI red team guidelines in June of last year, it joined AI providers including Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, and even the U.S.’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which all had released red teaming frameworks. Investing heavily in red teaming yields tangible benefits for security leaders in any organization. OpenAI’s paper on external red teaming provides a detailed analysis of how the company strives to create specialized external teams that include cybersecurity and subject matter experts. The goal is to see if knowledgeable external teams can defeat models’ security perimeters and find gaps in their security, biases and controls that prompt-based testing couldn’t find. What makes OpenAI’s recent papers noteworthy is how well they define using human-in-the-middle

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