Shared Anchors for Floating Wind: A Viable Solution?

28 Aug 2025

Floating offshore wind represents a revolutionary step towards influencing the energy transition, enabling the installation of turbines in deeper waters than fixed wind turbines. This allows access to stronger and more consistent winds. However, the deployment of floating wind farms presents unique challenges, one of which is the mooring system—a critical component that secures the turbines to the seabed. The concept of shared anchors has emerged as a potential solution to reduce costs and environmental impact. 

THE INNOVATION OF SHARED ANCHORS 

Traditional mooring systems have individual anchors for each Wind Turbine Generator (WTG) mooring line, which can have a significant footprint on the ocean floor but also be costly. Shared anchors, on the other hand, connect multiple mooring lines to a single anchor point. This approach not only reduces the number of anchors required but also minimises the disturbance to marine ecosystems.  

As of 2024, the implementation of shared anchors in floating offshore wind farms has only been realised in one commercial wind farm (Hywind Tampen). 

ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMICAL BENEFITS 

The economic benefits of shared anchors are potentially substantial. 

  • Environmentally, the reduced seabed footprint helps preserve the ocean’s biodiversity, making floating wind farms more acceptable to environmental stakeholders and regulatory bodies.
  • By reducing the amount of hardware and installation work needed, shared anchors can lower the capital expenditure (CAPEX) for floating wind projects – from construction to logistics and installation costs. 

Using shared anchors could be a viable solution when anchors are placed too close together, provided that it does not compromise the efficiency of mooring.

CHALLENGES AND CONSIDERATIONS 

While shared anchors offer numerous advantages, they also present several challenges that must be addressed:  

  • The design and engineering of shared anchors require advanced modeling to analyse the fully coupled response of the interconnected turbines and ensure that their dynamic behavior does not lead to increased wear or failure.
  • To force the shared anchors scenario, larger anchors and larger chains may be necessary, compromising the cost advantage. Also, the mooring system may need to be modified to make the anchor points match up. This could be changed in line heading or in adjusting the mooring line length, making the mooring system less efficient and potentially more costly.
  • In some cases, shared anchor designs were found to be optimised when adding alternating perpendicular shared lines between the floaters to decrease the risk of dispersion of coupling effects through the array. These lines would add to the cost of the whole mooring system.
  • Finally, with shared anchors, the risk is amplified, as a failure of one anchor could impact multiple turbines rather than just one. Therefore, the shared system must be robust enough to withstand extreme weather events and the potential loss of a single anchor point without compromising the integrity of the entire farm.  

THE PATH FORWARD 

The adoption of shared anchors is still in its early stages, with pilot projects and research initiatives underway to validate their feasibility and efficiency. As the industry gains more experience and data from these projects, shared anchors could become a viable practice in the deployment of some floating wind farms. Collaboration among industry players, researchers, and regulatory agencies will be crucial in developing guidelines and best practices for the design, installation, and maintenance of shared mooring systems. 

However, it is crucial to ensure that any shared anchor consideration is integrated into the complete mooring design cycle, which balances turbine size, turbine spacing and anchor selection. A strong mooring design starts with evaluating turbine spacing and an efficient mooring layout. At Acteon, we take a holistic approach for each project and prefer to first customise anchors and mooring lines depending on the soil, the turbine size and the spacing between the WTGs rather than start the design by assuming that we will use shared anchors. 

CONCLUSION 

The concept of shared anchors is still largely in the research and development phase. Still, they could represent a significant step forward in the evolution of floating wind technology. By offering a cost-effective and environmentally friendly solution, they have the potential to accelerate the adoption of floating wind energy on a global scale but are likely to become a site-specific solution.