After spending most of his career as an engineer in the oil and gas industry, Dan Jackson has turned his skills to greener ventures. He plans to put hundreds of floating turbines up to 200km off the Scottish coast, making him one of the pioneers of new technology designed to harness the greater wind speeds further out at sea.
The floating structures open up vast new areas offshore by overcoming the limitations of conventional turbines, which are fixed to the seabed and are difficult to install beyond depths of 60m. They are more expensive to install but those higher costs are offset by the fact they can generate significantly more energy.
“The wind resources out there are quite remarkable,” explained Jackson, founding director of private, England-based developer Cerulean Winds, which wants to develop a network of three connected floating wind farms across almost 1,000 sq km of the North Sea.