PelaStar: Revolutionizing Floating Offshore Wind with Tension Leg Platforms

We talk with Ben Ackers, CEO of PelaStar, a company revolutionizing the industry with their tension leg platform design. PelaStar's innovative technology provides stability for large wind turbines in deep water conditions, paving the way for cost-effective and efficient floating wind farms at scale. Visit https://pelastar.com/ for more info!



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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. With the increasing demand for clean energy, offshore wind has become a crucial component in the global energy mix. However, many of the world's best wind resources are located in deep waters where traditional fixed bottom foundations are not feasible.



And this is where PelaStar comes in. PelaStar is changing the floating offshore wind industry with their 10 leg platform design, which provides stability for large wind turbines in deep water conditions. Our guest today is Ben Ackers Chief Executive Officer at PelaStar. Ben brings a wealth of experience in the maritime industry to lead PelaStar's efforts in making floating offshore wind a reality on a large scale.



Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. There's a lot to talk about because with the recent auctions or the outlines of some offshore wind sites off the coast of Maine, and then obviously off the coast of California, floating wind is going to be huge in the United States, and it's already becoming something of an item over in Europe.



You at PelaStar have been trying to answer some of the problems that we have with floating offshore wind and maybe you can just give us a little bit of background on PelaStar and what you're working on right now.



Ben Ackers: Absolutely. First of all, PelaStar is, as you said, a tension leg platform which sets it apart from a lot of the platform technologies that you'll see that have been deployed in demonstration and pilot projects. We're really the next generation of technology that the industry needs to bring down the cost of energy for utility scale floating wind farms. We started developing PelaStar around 2009. The idea comes out of our parent company, Glosten, which is a naval architecture, marine engineering consulting firm headquartered in Seattle.



We've been around for over 65 years. And as our engineers were looking at the challenge of how do we put turbines offshore? We evaluated the different archetypes of the time. Semi submersible spars. And ultimately landed on tension leg platform is what we thought would be the best way to bring down the price of energy in the long run by developing platforms that have the lowest mass and the least amount of motion to drive down capex and operating costs.



Joel Saxum: So a quick question then there, we'll dive right into it is you highlighted what you believe the Or what in, it's physics, right? But what the tension leg platform has advantages over some of the other technologies that are out there, because like we, we talked about a little bit off air there's a lot of options and ideas and demonstrators and stuff, but nobody has really taken that the front runner, the pole position in the race for what's going to be built at scale in offshore floating.



So that's The tension leg platform idea. What are the advantages of it over some of the others?



Ben Ackers: Principally,