Jacket-Cage: Dual-Use the Jacket Foundation of Offshore Wind Turbine for Aquaculture Farming

Abstract

This paper presents a new concept: the dual-use of the jacket foundation of wind turbines for both energy extraction and aquaculture farming. Fish will be housed within a jacket foundation that is covered by fishnets. This new Jacket-Cage concept has two promising potential applications. First, the Jacket-Cage, utilizing the strong jacket foundation of wind turbines, has potential for operation under harsh offshore conditions. It requires no extra seabed footprint and no mooring systems. Due to the dual-use, the cost of the Jacket-Cage has potential to be competitive with the conventional fish cage. This study case demonstrates that the fish farming within the offshore wind farm could provide an important revenue stream for the offshore wind farm, e.g. the annual yield from the co-use increases by 44% compared to the pure offshore wind farm. The operation and maintenance of the fish farming by using Jacket-Cage has the potential to use the existing facilities from the offshore wind farm and to create new effective aquaculture functionality. The proposed installation procedures reveal no additional time and no special bottlenecks in its installation compared to the installation of the jacket foundation. The risks of the dual-use of the foundation of the wind turbine are indicated and the further investigations, including the important additional loads from the attached fishnets, are recommended. This study case demonstrates many promising features of this innovative Jacket-Cage to integrate the offshore wind farm with aquaculture farm. Second, the Jacket-Cage itself provides an entirely new aquaculture farming structure for operation under harsh offshore conditions.