Methodology to study the life cycle cost of floating offshore wind farms

The main objective of this paper is to determine a theoretical methodology process to study the life cycle cost of floating offshore wind farms. The principal purpose is adapting the LCC (Life-Cycle Cost Calculation) from several authors to the offshore wind energy world, providing a new method which will be called LCSFOWF. In this sense, several general steps will be defined: life cycle definition, process breakdown structure, viability study and sensitivity study. Moreover, technical and economic issues and their relations will be considered. On the other hand, six life cycle phases needed to install a floating offshore wind farm will be defined: conception and definition, design and development, manufacturing, installation, exploitation and dismantling. They will be useful to define the majority of the steps in the process. This methodology could be considered to calculate the real cost of constructing floating offshore wind farms