Mr. Gary Tobin:

In looking at this sector, one of the things that struck me is how fast the technology is developing. The size of the fixed turbines being used is increasing. The Deputy will be aware that certain offshore wind parks were initially looking at using up to 300 turbines but because of developments in turbine design and increased turbine size, they may only have to use 80 turbines, so the sector is developing rapidly.

The general view is that floating wind technology does not currently exist at commercial scale. There are a lot of floating offshore wind projects globally but they all tend to be small demonstrator projects and if one adds together what they are producing then it is really very small. Currently, in global terms floating probably represents less than 1% of installed offshore wind capacity. In the Offshore Renewable Energy Support Scheme 1, ORESS 1, which is the most recent auction, all of the projects were fixed-bottom offshore wind projects. That said, what was also very clear to us in Bilbao and from discussions with industry generally is that they are very interested in floating because they kind of see that as the next step. I think there are opportunities for us to develop a significant demonstrator floating site. At the moment no one has really done that in the Atlantic, for example. No decisions have been made where one would do a floating demonstrator site but clearly there could be a lot of interest. Obviously this would all be dependent on analysis and ultimately Government decisions and so forth but it might be very interesting if there was a demonstrator off the west coast where one could see the Atlantic conditions and how that impacted.