Environment

The world’s largest floating wind farm is now officially open — and helping to power North Sea oil operations

Published

2 years ago

August 23, 2023

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The Hywind Tampen project is located in waters off the Norwegian coast.

Ole Berg-rusten | AFP | Getty Images

A facility described as “the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm” was officially opened by Crown Prince Haakon of Norway on Wednesday, marking the culmination of a major renewable energy project years in the making.

Located around 140 kilometers (86.9 miles) off the coast of Norway in depths ranging from 260 to 300 meters, Hywind Tampen uses 11 turbines. The wind farm produced its first power in Nov. 2022 and became fully operational this month.

While wind is a renewable energy source, Hywind Tampen helps power operations at oil and gas fields, the idea being that it will cut these sites’ carbon dioxide emissions in the process.

“Hywind Tampen has a system capacity of 88 MW and is expected to cover about 35 per cent of the annual need for electricity on the five platforms Snorre A and B and Gullfaks A, B and C,” Norwegian energy firm Equinor said.

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Floating offshore wind turbines are different from fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines, which are rooted to the seabed. One advantage of floating turbines is that they can be installed in far deeper waters than fixed-bottom ones.

In recent years a range of companies and major economies like the U.S. have laid out goals to ramp up floating wind installations.

Equinor, a major player in the fossil fuel industry, describes the turbines at Hywind Tampen as being “mounted on floating concrete structures with a common anchoring system.”

Alongside Equinor, partners in the Hywind Tampen project include Vår Energi, INPEX Idemitsu, Petoro, Wintershall Dea and OMV.

The project off Norway’s coast marks Equinor’s latest move in the floating wind sector. Back in 2017, it started operations at Hywind Scotland, a five-turbine, 30 MW facility it calls the planet’s first floating wind farm.

“With Hywind Tampen, we have shown that we can plan, build and commission a large, floating offshore wind farm in the North Sea,” Equinor’s Siri Kindem, who heads up the firm’s renewables business in Norway, said in a statement.

“We will use the experience and learning from this project to become even better,” she added. “We will build bigger, reduce costs and build a new industry on the shoulders of the oil and gas industry.”

Powering the oil and gas industry

The use of a floating wind farm to help power the fossil fuel industry is likely to spark significant debate at a time when discussions about climate change and the environment are at the front and center of many people’s minds.

This is because fossil fuels’ effect on the environment is considerable. The United Nations says that, since the 19th century, “human activities have been the main driver of climate change, primarily due to burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas.”

“Burning fossil fuels generates greenhouse gas emissions that act like a blanket wrapped around the Earth, trapping the sun’s heat and raising temperatures,” it adds.

The stakes are high. Speaking at the COP27 climate change summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, last year, the U.N. Secretary General issued a stark warning to attendees.

“We are in the fight of our lives, and we are losing,” Antonio Guterres said.

“Greenhouse gas emissions keep growing, global temperatures keep rising, and our planet is fast approaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible.”

Environment

I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

Published

2 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.

Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!

I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!

Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.

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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.

Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!

Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.

The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.

The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!

I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.

That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.

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Environment

OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

Published

3 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.

This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.

In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”

The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.

One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.

Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.

They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.

Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.

At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.

Environment

Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Published

17 hours ago

July 4, 2025

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Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Today’s episode is brought to you by Bosch Mobility Aftermarket—A global leader and trusted provider of automotive aftermarket parts. To celebrate Amazon Prime Day July 8th through 11th, Bosch Mobility is offering exclusive savings on must-have auto parts and tools. Learn more here.

The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.

As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.

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After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:

We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.

Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast: