Vote Now in Recharge's Floating Wind Power Player of the Year award

Finn Gunnar Nielsen, professor at the Geophysical Institute at University of Bergen, Norway, has long specialised offshore wind energy. He held his primary positions at Norsk Hydro and, after the merger with compatriot state-owned oil & gas company Statoil in 2007, the Statoil R&D department, where his research focused on the interaction between waves, wind and current and structural dynamics. In 2002, Nielsen started up a small group working on the question of how wind turbines could be located at deep water sites, resulting in the first design of the Hywind floating wind turbine. In 2009, this work reached fruition with installation of the world’s first full scale multi-megawatt floating wind turbine, the Hywind Demo, a design which has since led to the development of the world’s first floating wind array, the 30MW in Hywind Scotland wind farm, in the UK North Sea, switched on in October 2017.

Johan Sandberg has been working with floating wind turbine technology throughout his 10 years with DNV GL. He led the development of DNV GL’s first design standard for floating turbines, and has been responsible for the WIN WIN project, a long-view initiative aimed at integrating floating wind turbines into the oil & gas industry to advance the technology while sustainably extending the producing life of ageing offshore fields. When DNV and GL merged in 2013, Sandberg was responsible for the renewables division’s contribution of the 2050 vision developed by the company and focused on floating wind turbines. Part of this work resulted in the Nigashima Shelf project, an inspirational imagining of how floating wind power could be at the heart of a worldwide revolution in the ‘blue economy’, which has led to DNV GL developing a range of initiatives design to accelerate the advancement of the floating wind industry.

Takeshi Ishihara, professor at the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Tokyo, Japan, has been at the forefront of floating wind technology development in his country and internationally. From heading up early work in dynamic response prediction of floating wind turbines in offshore conditions for the Japanese government in 2008, he went on to spearhead the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation’s next-generation floating offshore wind turbine project that led, in 2011, to construction of the world’s first multi-unit floating wind development, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry-funded 14MW Fukushima Forward project, on which he continues to serve as technical advisor . Ishihara is currently running the advanced wind power technology programme for a joint venture comprising Hitachi, ClassNK and Shimizu Corporation. He is also president of the Japanese Wind Energy Association.