It’ll continue to drop. Bigger turbines will help. Some projects being planned at the moment have 15MW devices pencilled in. Biggest currently available is 9.5MW.
Better consenting also helping – much less time being wasted for some projects (e.g. Hornsea and East Anglia) than was the case in the beginning.
Further down the line they’ll be floating devices and other innovations. Floating turbines are in their infancy at the moment, but they’ll eventually drive down installation cost, and possibly increase yields if you could move them about easily. I’ve also seen concepts of wind turbines with wave devices, tidal devices and even solar panels attached. Early days again, but interesting.
Whilst it is true that the O&G situation is helping to drive cost down, a large number of the vessels used at offshore wind farms are not the same vessels that O&G use. Turbine installation jack-ups being the obvious (and most expensive) one, but there’s a lot of OWF-specific boats out there. Perhaps there’s an excess of OWF workboats for example because of the number that have been built for the Round 3 sites, which haven’t entered full construction mode yet for the most part. So costs may rise a bit as that all kicks off.
Interesting times for sure.