Royal Caribbean Group’s new Galveston terminal, which is opening on Nov. 9, will be the first cruise terminal to generate 100% of its needed energy through on-site solar panels. According to a press statement, this makes the terminal, which will be used by the company’s Royal Caribbean International brand, the first LEED Zero Energy facility in the world.
We are focused on innovating across all aspects of our company, especially in our work to advance sustainability in the communities we visit,” said Jason Liberty, president and CEO, of Royal Caribbean Group. “We deeply value both the oceans we sail and the communities we visit and operate in, and the modern design and development features at our terminal in Galveston will work in service of both.”
The new cruise terminal at the Port of Galveston will be the first in Texas to achieve LEED Gold certification, an industry-leading certification expected to be received within the first two quarters of 2023.
The Galveston terminal marks the cruise company’s fourth LEED-certified facility and its first Gold certified. The previous projects include Terminal A at PortMiami; the Springfield, Oregon campus; and the Innovation Lab at Royal Caribbean Group’s corporate headquarters in Miami.
The $125 million, 161,334-square-foot Galveston Cruise Terminal significantly expands the company’s presence in the port, increasing the cruise line’s ability to accommodate up to 630,000 guests annually. The opening of the terminal will mark the first time Galveston welcomes Royal Caribbean International’s signature Oasis Class, the world’s largest cruise ship, with the arrival of Allure of the Seas and the first time the company is bringing its frictionless arrival and departure process to Texas.
Spanish shipbuilder Navantia is stepping up its bet on offshore wind energy, a venture that stands to benefit from the European Union’s fiscal response to the pandemic.
The landmark 750 billion-euro ($890 billion) pandemic-recovery aid will encourage Spain to invest more in clean energy. That could galvanize the company’s recent pivot into sea-based power projects, said Managing Director Javier Herrador del Rio. With demand flagging for its military vessels, Navantia has branched into building the massive foundations for wind turbines that can stretch out of the water as high as a 50-story office building.
The comment underscores how companies across the EU are gearing up to take part in the bloc’s biggest-ever stimulus package. Europe’s leaders have said they want countries to spend a significant portion of the funds on making the regional economy more carbon-neutral. Navantia’s green projects might become a test case for the program.
‘Highly Cyclical’
Spain and Italy are poised to be among the largest recipients of the funds and both countries are hashing out details of how to spend the money. The fiscal jolt is an opportunity for the Spanish administration to start investing in offshore wind farms in the northern Galicia and Basque regions and in southern Andalusia, Herrador del Rio said.
Naval shipbuilding “is highly cyclical and even more so during such volatile times like we’re living through now – when we exit one crisis and then fall into another,” the managing director of Navantia’s Bay of Cadiz Shipyard said in an interview. Rocky economic times limited Spain’s ability to invest in new ships and forced state-owned Navantia into more manufacturing areas. The offshore wind became a strategic priority in 2018, he said.
The firm’s fortunes have ebbed since the 1980s when demand was high for made-in-Europe warships and oil tankers and the company employed about 40,000. While staff has since dropped to about one-tenth of that, it was still able to take on Saudi Arabia’s 2018 order of five corvettes for its navy, one of Navantia’s few major shipbuilding contracts in recent years.
Incipient Industry
While Spain was a global pioneer in solar and wind projects, the offshore wind-park industry is still quite young. Contracts Navantia has signed in the sector don’t generate nearly as much revenue as building submarines and aircraft carriers.
Overall, companies globally are operating about 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy, said Imogen Brown, an analyst at BloombergNEF, an energy research firm. That’s a fraction of the 611 gigawatts of land-based wind projects, based on data through 2019, she said.
Most of the turbines are in the North Sea, off the coasts of the U.K., the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. The strong winds and comparatively shallow seabed have allowed major players such as Denmark’s Bladt Industries and the Netherlands’ Sif Group to anchor what is known as “bottom-fixed” turbines to the ocean floor.
Navantia has received commissions for 10 projects since 2014, including orders to manufacture several dozen bottom-fixed turbines for Iberdrola’s 500-megawatt offshore wind farm in Brittany.
The Mediterranean Sea that borders much of Spain has relatively deep waters. That has pushed Navantia and other manufacturers, including Italian shipbuilder Saipem SpA, to shift their focus to floating wind turbines. But the technology is still incipient and there’s not a standardized design, Brown said.
“It’s only demonstration projects that have been commissioned so far,” she said. “We think bottom-fixed wind turbines will still be the driver in the market pre-2030.”
Europe’s increased funding for clean-energy projects will help to bolster investments in technologies to improve floating projects, Herrador del Rio said at the company’s Puerto Real shipyard near the Strait of Gibraltar, the strategic entrance to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean. That funding will eventually lead to building more wind farms off the Spanish coasts and in the Mediterranean Sea.
“Sooner or later it will become a reality,” he said. “I’m convinced.”
By William Mathis and Laura Millan Lombrana (Bloomberg) — Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA has one eye on the future where its wind turbines could play a key role in creating hydrogen.
The company, which earlier this year launched the world’s biggest wind turbine, plans to start a pilot project in Denmark to test how its machines could power production of the fuel seen as key to eliminating carbon emissions from transportation and heavy industries. The European Union has big plans for the clean-burning gas and the bloc placed it at the centre of its Green Deal earlier this year.
The pilot project is under construction near Siemens Gamesa’s Danish headquarters in Brande, western Denmark, Chief Executive Officer Andreas Nauen said in an interview on Thursday. It will include a 3-megawatt wind turbine that will power a 400-kilowatt electrolyzer, a machine that separates the hydrogen atoms in water from oxygen atoms, “We will be for the first time combining the two technologies,” said Nauen, who took over as CEO in June after leading the company’s offshore division. “It is not to produce hydrogen in big quantities, but to test the combination of both.”
It could be a compelling model. Danish utility Orsted A/S is already exploring a number of hydrogen projects for its wind farms and Royal Dutch Shell Plc plans to produce the gas from a park it’s going to build off the Dutch coast. Making and selling hydrogen could provide a new source of revenue for wind projects that would offset the risk in the sometimes volatile electricity market.
BNEF projections of the cost of producing green hydrogen, when compared with hydrogen derived from natural gas.
No one before has used wind power alone, without a grid connection, to produce hydrogen, Nauen said. It’s a project that will provide insight that could be crucial to scaling up the technology too much larger turbines and wind farms both on land and at sea.
Earlier this year, Siemens Gamesa announced plans to build a 14-megawatt offshore turbine with a rotor diameter of 222 meters (728 feet), a few meters larger than the previous record.
The company expects to conduct testing at the hydrogen pilot from October to December and then start hydrogen production in January. A Danish hydrogen fuel company called Everfuel will distribute the gas for vehicles including taxis and buses to use in Copenhagen.
European governments aim to spend billions of dollars to help nurture domestic industries to produce hydrogen. The funding could help scale production and bring down costs.
Offshore Experience
Siemens Gamesa is currently at a similar stage with hydrogen as it was a few years ago with offshore wind, Nauen said.
The executive has worked in offshore wind for more than a decade and has seen how the industry went from being a niche market using turbines designed for land use into a multi-billion-dollar industry with tailor-made machines the size of skyscrapers. Hydrogen could follow a similar trajectory if companies figure out an economical way to produce it. If it takes off, hydrogen will change the whole energy landscape, he said.
“I could imagine maybe it goes a little faster now, but it’s way too early,” Nauen said. “All the money that you currently see coming into this business is about making sure the technology works.”
The company has a team working on hydrogen that’s spread across all of Siemens Gamesa’s divisions. In the future, the company could sell wind farm developers hydrogen equipment along with its turbines, Nauen said. But he doesn’t expect any large-scale wind-hydrogen project until around 2025.
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