Equinor pulls the plug on floating wind farm in the North Sea

Equinor has decided to indefinitely postpone its plans for the 1GW floating offshore wind farm in Norway’s North Sea known as Trollvind, citing technology availability, time constraints and rising costs as factors that have made the project commercially unviable without financial support. The energy company and its partners, Petoro, TotalEnergies, Shell and ConocoPhillips, had launched the project in June 2022 with the intention of providing power to offshore Troll and Oseberg fields via an onshore connection point. Equinor had previously announced reduced activity on the project due to technical, regulatory and commercial challenges facing the offshore wind industry in general.

Siri Espedal Kindem, Vice President for Renewable Energy in Norway, said: “Trollvind was a bold industrial plan…to provide much-needed power to the Bergen region while accelerating floating offshore wind power in Norway. Unfortunately, we no longer see a way to implement our original concept of putting a wind farm into operation in good time before 2030.” Equinor says authorities have been informed of the decision and adds that the knowledge and learnings from the work at Trollvind will be applied to other projects as the company remains committed to building a floating offshore wind industry in Norway in partnership with other energy companies.

Tags: equinor,floating wind farm,offshore wind


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