**3. General Description of the Parc Tramuntana Project**

The Tramuntana Floating Offshore Wind Farm Project consists of the installation of an offshore renewable energy generation farm on the continental shelf of the province of Girona, at a distance of approximately 24 km from the coast of the Bay of Roses, in a range of depths between 120 and 180 m and on thick silty and detritic seabed, with a total absence of rocky outcrops. The turbine closest to the coast is located 14 km from Cap de Creus.

The wind farm is located within the area designated in the draft of the *POEM* for the Levantine-Balearic demarcation as a priority area for offshore wind (LEBA-2, Figure 1), being the only area identified in Catalonia as suitable for this type of activity. This site also partially coincides with a permanent closed area for trawling and is located outside protected natural areas.

**Figure 1.** Location of the Tramuntana Floating Offshore Wind Farm Project in relation to environmental protected sites and other uses of maritime space.

The proposed solution consists of the following elements (Figure 2):

**Figure 2.** General layout of the Tramuntana Floating Offshore Wind Farm Project.


The estimated net energy production is approximately 1800 GWh/year, equivalent to 45% of the current consumption of the province of Girona, both household and industrial. The project includes a research platform, which will be developed in collaboration with the *Institut de Recerca d'Energia de Catalunya* (IREC) and will serve as a sandbox for different lines of R + D + i in the field of offshore renewable energy harnessing, as well as in other compatible uses of marine space such as aquaculture, fishing recovery, etc.

The wind farm takes up an area of approximately 95 km<sup>2</sup> where floating turbines and their anchoring systems are located. This area represents less than 0.12% of the surface of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) corresponding to Catalonia.

The 15 MW turbines have a total height of 261 m and a rotor diameter of 236 m, and are installed with a separation between turbines of between 1.2 and 2.5 km. They are attached to the seabed by 3 or 4 catenaries, each about 650 m long, attached to an anchor that remains buried about 14 m below the seabed.

The turbines are connected to each other by dynamic inter-array cables, which partially rest on the seabed, and from the end of each row of turbines comes an export cable, buried between 1.5 and 2 m below the seabed, which carries the generated energy to land. In the land–sea transition zone, a solution using small diameter perforations (Horizontal Directional Drilling or HDD) has been adopted to facilitate the landing of the cable without altering the seabed or the biological communities settled on it.

From the grounding point to the connection with the electrical grid, all the high voltage conduits are projected buried, to minimize the environmental and landscape impact.

Keeping this development proposal as an objective, since it is considered necessary to provide the Catalan system with this minimum capacity of marine renewable generation, the possibility of a phased development of the project is also proposed, so that a single array can be initially executed together with the sandbox facility. This would allow to advance in the installation of the general energy export infrastructures, and to have for a certain period of time a testing and demonstration facility to validate these types of wind farms in the Mediterranean and to verify their environmental and socioeconomic compatibility.
