Reflections on 2024
2024 was the year where we transformed to face the future as a new, stronger organization focused on capitalizing on years of technical development work. As we now enter 2025 we have a solid product and system portfolio, strong and promising customer relations, an established brand, and a powerful macro-trend for decarbonization and renewable energy.
A year of transformation
2024 has been an exciting, demanding, transforming, but most of all a very fruitful year for us. As we wrap up the year it is time to reflect.
We started off this year with the conceptual development of our largest turbine, the SeaTwirl S3, with capacity up to 6MW. This completed our portfolio with a large turbine that could be offered to a whole new category of customers. After that the time had come to increase focus on business and commercial development. Through several collaboration agreements signed during 2024 we have been able to engage deeper with our customer’s technical and commercial needs and gained a greater understanding of their requirements and expectations. With this knowledge we have been able to tailor our offerings, marketing strategies, and overall business approach to better meet customer demands. As we enter 2025, we will continue to build new, as well as strengthening existing, customer relationships based on our unique customer value proposition.
Disruptive innovation
It is well-known that the utility scale floating wind market has been facing significant challenges during the past few years with high interest rates, supply chain challenges, and political uncertainty in many markets. To reach a competitive cost of energy, there is an increasingly common view that floating wind may need disruptive innovation. Just the fact that the European commission explicitly state in the latest Horizon Europe call for innovative floating wind concepts that the purpose is to “demonstrate innovative floating vertical or horizontal axis offshore wind energy platforms” is a powerful declaration that this is the view also in Brussels. But 2024 also brought bright moments of hope to the industry like the 400MW GreenVolt project CfD award in the UK and several demonstration projects installed during the year, indicating that financing can be available for the right projects.
Significant shifts in the market
With more than six years in SeaTwirl our Head of Business Development, Peter Laurits, has observed several shifts in the market. Some of his main observations has been that over the past two years, the market attitudes to SeaTwirl have changed drastically. Previously, we actively pursued opportunities but now customers are also reaching out to us on a weekly basis. While the large, well established, renewable energy OEM’s have focused on extensive projects such as GW-scale wind farms, they rarely have bandwidth to develop projects of smaller scale. This creates a substantial opportunity for SeaTwirl that we intend to pursue.
The global market demand for electrification of remote islands and offshore oil and gas is substantial, and we have a structured approach to identifying and prioritizing opportunities where our technology aligns with market needs and where the geographical region offers strategic value. The oil & gas industry is under very strong pressure to decarbonize their operations, and it is particularly strong in the North Sea. As such, we have been particularly focused on Norway and Scotland/UK during the past year and will continue to do so in 2025. But Asian markets as well as other European countries are also very promising, particularly our collaboration with Sumitomo in Japan, and oil and gas operators in Southeast Asia.
A productive year for product development
When it comes to product development 2024 has been a very productive year. Strategic alliances such as the battery supplier Verlume has broadened our offering and invited us into new and promising tender processes. The engineering team, under leadership of our CTO Jonas Boström, have passed several important milestones during 2024:
– Conceptually developed the S3 turbine and made it suitable for electrification of oil & gas platforms and islands.
– Adapting our technical solution for all possible locations, conditions, and power demands, making us able to offer customized solutions for each unique case in a very efficient way.
– Shown that “tow to shore” for major component replacement can be avoided with our technology.
– Breakthroughs with floating VAWT assessment, speeding up the process for site evaluation – allowing us to offer our customers an understanding of CAPEX, OPEX, energy production from our turbines already in an early planning stage.
– Refined our software toolbox and systems further and can confidently claim to be second-to-none on vertical axis wind turbine software, simulations, and systems.
– Significantly developed our supplier base resulting in further reduced costs.
Building on 2024´s Momentum into 2025
2024 was the year where we transformed to face the future as a new, stronger organization focused on capitalizing on years of technical development work. As we now enter 2025 we have a solid product and system portfolio, strong and promising customer relations, an established brand, and a powerful macro-trend for decarbonization and renewable energy.
We will now leverage this momentum and continue to work relentlessly to demonstrate commercial attractiveness for our technology and to secure financing to start building.
2025 will also offer a range of opportunities for soft funding where we intend to build strong consortia for successful applications. We will remain focused on cost control and efficiency but also make strategic investments where it will make the most impact.
As we close out this year, we want to thank all stakeholders for a great year and are looking forward together to 2025, with new and promising opportunities. I would particularly like to thank our shareholders who stick with us through times of uncertainty.
On behalf of everyone at SeaTwirl, we wish you all a happy holiday season and time to charge the batteries, preferably with floating wind power, for an exciting 2025.
Wishing everyone a Happy New Year and all the best for 2025!
Johan Sandberg, CEO SeaTwirl