The LIGHTWIND project has opened an offshore wind drivetrain survey for industry stakeholders. The goal is simple: find out what the market actually needs, before the project’s technology is finalised.
Floating offshore wind is expected to push turbines well beyond today’s 15 MW scale. But current drivetrain designs were built for bottom-fixed turbines, not floating ones. As turbines get bigger, nacelles get heavier. Heavier nacelles make floating platforms harder to build and more expensive to justify. High repair costs add another barrier. This matters most for sites further from shore, where maintenance is harder and more costly.
LIGHTWIND is a Horizon Europe project developing a compact, lightweight drivetrain for next-generation offshore wind turbines. We’re consulting offshore wind stakeholders, including developers, utilities, OEMs, suppliers, floating platform developers, investors, regulators and research organisations, to make sure our technical solutions match real market needs.
Who the survey is for
The survey is open to anyone working across the offshore wind value chain. That includes wind farm developers and utilities, who see deployment realities on the ground. It includes OEMs and component suppliers, who know what’s actually feasible to manufacture and source. It includes floating platform developers, who deal directly with the engineering trade-offs a new drivetrain creates. And it includes investors, regulators and research organisations. Each of these groups sees different risks and opportunities in bringing new technology to market.
Each group experiences the challenges of floating wind differently. That’s exactly why LIGHTWIND wants input from across the whole chain, rather than from just one type of organisation.
What kind of input we’re looking for
The survey asks about market needs and the practical barriers to deployment. It also covers the technical and economic conditions that would make a new drivetrain design worth adopting. Supply-chain readiness is another focus area. So are sustainability factors and the routes that would actually get new technology to market.
In short, we want to know what would make this technology genuinely useful, not just technically interesting.
How it works
This offshore wind drivetrain survey takes around 10 to 15 minutes. Smart branching logic means respondents only see the sections relevant to their organisation. Utilities and OEMs, for instance, won’t be asked the same questions. All responses are analysed in aggregated, anonymised form. No individual response will be attributed without explicit permission.
Why this matters
Stakeholder input gathered through the survey will feed directly into LIGHTWIND’s ongoing work. The aim is to align technical development with real-world market conditions. Technology that works in a lab but ignores what industry actually needs rarely makes it to deployment. This survey is one of the ways LIGHTWIND is trying to avoid that outcome.
Take the survey: https://forms.office.com/e/Bv3PdfjVzC