Decommissioning of offshore wind turbines

Abstract

Decommissioning is a key process in the offshore wind industry because all substructures, bottom fixed or floating, have to be removed and completely dismantled at the end of their service life. There is still no experience of decommissioning a floating wind substructure and only two very small offshore wind farms with bottom fixed platforms have already been decommissioned. Devising save and effective processes to dismantle wind offshore substructures is a challenge that has to be faced in civil engineering in near future.