Equinor Korea, signs co-development Letter of Agreement with Ulsan Offshore Wind Countermeasures Committee for Firefly project

Equinor Korea, the Korean subsidiary of Norwegian state-owned energy company Equinor, announced today the signing of a co-development Letter of Agreement for the Firefly floating offshore wind power generation project, together with the Ulsan fishermen’s organization called Offshore Wind Countermeasures Committee (Chairman Park Choon-soo).

With this agreement, Equinor and the Ulsan Offshore Wind Countermeasures Committee formed a consultative body to promote the project at the earliest, and to make efforts to compensate for the losses of the fishing industry. In addition, the parties agreed to cooperate with each other in obtaining approval for the power generation business license for the Ulsan Firefly floating offshore wind power generation project.

Firefly is an 800MW floating wind power project that Equinor is pushing for some 70km east of Ulsan Port. The project is 10 times larger than Hywind Tampen, an 88MW floating offshore wind farm in Scotland, which Equinor is pushing for commercialization in 2022. In June 2020, a wind measurement instrument called LiDARs were installed to collect wind data for more than a year.

Equinor is already operating Hywind Scotland, the world’s first commercial floating offshore wind farm in the northeast of United Kingdom in 2017. Equinor is also well-known for taking a cooperative approach and making company-wide efforts for co-development in the region and society where it conducts business by utilizing this experience. As part of these efforts, on July 29, Equinor signed an agreement to collaborate with Scottish Government Directorate Marine Scotland to better understand how fishers can safely operate around and within floating offshore wind farms.