X1 WIND: Lighter, Faster, Proven
Floating offshore wind can be cheaper, more efficient, and faster to deploy, and X1 Wind is busy proving this by piloting an innovative structure in Spain. For the past decade, the company has been developing disruptive ideas that will allow energy to be generated further from shore, in deeper water, harnessing stronger winds – doing all of this in a truly environmentally friendly way. CEO Alex Raventos tells Energy Focus more about a journey that is gathering significant momentum.
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Interview with Alex Raventos, CEO
Floating offshore wind has spent the past two years absorbing a run of bad news. Equinor cancelled its 750MW Firefly project in South Korea. The UK’s fully-consented, CfD-backed Green Volt scheme remains several hurdles short of a final investment decision after an electrification deal collapsed. Analysis from Aegir Insights points to a pattern running through both setbacks: contractual and regulatory failures rather than engineering ones.
Nothing on the list of stalled commercial projects is a floater that did not work. Against that backdrop, a Barcelona-based technology developer has spent the downturn collecting the certification, permits and funding needed to prove that the next generation of floating wind platforms can be lighter, cheaper, more sustainable, and faster to deploy than anything currently in the water.
X1 Wind was founded in 2017 by CEO Alex Raventos and CTO Carlos Casanovas, who met while working on a floating tidal project in the Netherlands. Casanovas had already spent two years at MIT studying early floating wind concepts after leaving a large turbine manufacturer in 2012, developing ideas around a problem he had identified in the sector’s dominant platform designs. Raventos, whose background lay in techno-economic analysis of renewable innovations, recognised the commercial potential immediately. “We saw that it was extremely competitive as the steel weight was so much less than the existing technologies of the time,” he says of the concept that became the company’s PivotBuoy platform. Today the business employs around 35 people, mostly engineers drawn from mechanical engineering, naval architecture, electrical engineering and civil aviation. “We handle all of the design of our structures inhouse, and that is unique,” Raventos notes, of a team built to develop disruptive ideas rather than replicate the industry’s existing playbook.
LIGHTER BY DESIGN
What that team has built is a platform that behaves differently to almost everything else currently being tested at scale. Rather than the spar buoys and semi-submersible structures most developers have pursued, X1 Wind’s design pairs a single-point mooring system with a downwind turbine configuration, allowing the whole platform to passively weathervane and self-orientate with the wind rather than requiring active positioning. Removing the traditional tower in favour of a tripod-shaped structure transmits load more efficiently and strips out significant weight. The company’s X100 platform, built for turbines around 160m in diameter, achieves a primary steel weight of just 1,500 tons, a saving of 30% to 50% against traditional steel floaters installed in comparable European pilot projects. Raventos frames the advantage in commercial terms rather than engineering pride: the whole point was proving that a lighter structure could still be as stable and reliable as the heavier alternatives it was competing against.
The patented PivotBuoy mooring system does more than reduce weight. Combining elements of a tension-leg platform with a single-point mooring arrangement allows the structure to be assembled onshore and towed to site using small to medium vessels rather than the heavy-lift ships more conventional platforms require, and the company’s proprietary Quick Connector System cuts hook-up and disconnection operations to a single day, an improvement of more than 80% on pre-commercial projects already installed elsewhere in the world. Together, those efficiencies are expected to deliver up to a 50% reduction in capital costs compared with recent pre-commercial floating wind projects in Europe. The vertical mooring lines bring an environmental benefit too. “We have reduced footprint on the seabed, there is less noise, and everything is considered to be the most environmentally friendly way of moving forward,” Raventos says, a design choice that also allows the platform to coexist with fisheries and other marine activity rather than displacing them.
X1 Wind’s business model reflects the same focus on doing one thing well. “We design and develop wind energy technology. We are not manufacturers,” Raventos explains. “We patent our designs – we have eight patents – and then license the tech to our clients,” with revenue from each licence reinvested into further improving the technology rather than into manufacturing capacity the company would otherwise need to build and maintain. “We choose not to manufacture because that means big investments into facilities and we believe it is more efficient to focus on technology and then partner with industrial players to scale up,” he adds, a structure that lets X1 Wind concentrate its team entirely on engineering while established partners handle fabrication and installation at scale.
GREEN LIGHTS SECURED
The company’s patience and belief in its model has paid off in 2026. In March, the X100 platform received a Statement of Compliance for Basic Design from DNV, confirming the platform’s structural design and hydrodynamic behaviour meet international safety standards, including its response to 500-year extreme wave, wind and current conditions. “We were recently certified by DNV, probably one of the most experienced certification companies, so that we can install the first commercial scale pilot. That will be an 8.5MW floating wind turbine to be installed in the northeast of Spain,” Raventos says.
Four months later, the project’s installation site at PlemCat in Catalonia secured its Environmental Impact Assessment under Spain’s most rigorous environmental evaluation process. “We were very happy to receive the environmental permit as that is critical to ensure the project has an acceptable environmental impact,” Raventos notes, calling it, alongside the DNV certification, the “technical and environmental green lights” the project needed before deployment.
The project carrying both milestones is NextFloat, led jointly by X1 Wind and Technip Energies. Regarding the project’s specific financing, progress is highly advanced. “We are now approaching our financing milestone, and we have 85% of the funds already raised. We are expecting financial close by early next year,” Raventos says. Manufacturing is expected to begin in 2027, deploying the 8.5MW platform at PlemCat for several years of offshore operation designed to generate the data needed for final prototype certification and full commercial-scale deployment.
In parallel to the project’s development, September brought a separate major milestone at the corporate level: X1 Wind closed a fourth strategic funding round. This corporate raise was led by Grow Venture Partners, with Catalan investment body Avançsa joining alongside existing backers and Technip Energies, who has been a shareholder in the company since an earlier funding round.
Getting there has meant treating NextFloat as more than a test of X1 Wind’s own technology. A parallel research project, Next TLP, brings the company together with the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and marine anchoring specialist GEMIGEO to develop simplified pre-dimensioning methods and faster geotechnical investigation techniques specifically for tension-leg mooring systems, work that will feed directly back into X1 Wind’s commercial-scale designs.
“This whole journey is not only about our technology. Across NextFloat construction, we are working with well-known suppliers in order to push innovation,” Raventos says. “We are doing the design of the floating structure, but others are testing new mooring line systems, new loadout methods, new connectors – there is a lot of innovation and we are certainly looking forward to demonstrating that.” That supplier network matters because the components involved are largely drawn from a different industry altogether. “Most of the suppliers are much bigger companies than we are. They are typically supplying the oil and gas markets with floating rigs and now developing floating wind platforms,” Raventos explains. “It’s about having a good design but also having a robust supply chain because that impacts how you manage risk and ensure your systems are reliable.”
A SECTOR RECOVERING
The certification, the permit and the funding round have arrived at a moment when the wider floating wind sector is showing its first real signs of recovery after a genuinely difficult stretch. “Floating wind, as a sector, has seen two very tough years,” Raventos admits. “There were supply chain constraints due to several factors, in particular the war in Ukraine and the general macroeconomic situation. That impacted the wider offshore wind industry dramatically, and when combined with high interest rates, it was a perfect storm for offshore wind. Projects were cancelled, projects were postponed, and floating wind was at the back of the queue and therefore severely affected.” X1 Wind felt the disruption directly. “We had a site in France where the permits were cancelled. We moved the project to Spain, and we then had to wait two years,” Raventos says.
However, Aegir Insights’ mid-2026 review of the floating wind pipeline found France’s 30MW EFGL demonstrator reaching full power and Spain approving two separate environmental assessments at the PLOCAN test site within a single month, evidence that a wave of demonstrator projects is retiring the technical risk the next tier of commercial projects will be financed against. The European Union’s own figures show why the pressure to deliver more offshore wind capacity keeps building: renewables supplied 47.3% of the bloc’s electricity in 2025, with wind alone accounting for more than a third of that generation, the largest single renewable source on the continent.
“At the start of this year, the winds changed slightly and we now have permits and certification, and we have closed our investment round with a new investor onboard, so we are seeing more traction,” Raventos says. “It certainly feels like there has been a realisation that, in terms of energy, there is only one way forward, and renewable projects are being awarded in Europe. We are seeing positivity in France, the UK, Spain, Portugal, and Italy.”
The shift has not gone unnoticed beyond Europe either; in July 2025, X1 Wind’s PivotBuoy technology was selected for a Merit Award at the TERA Awards in Cambridge, chosen from more than 780 applications as the only floating offshore wind entrant recognised that year.
None of that recovery changes the scale of what floating wind still needs to prove. The technology exists precisely because roughly 70% of the world’s offshore wind potential sits in waters currently too deep for fixed-bottom foundations, a resource that stays untapped until platforms like X1 Wind’s can be built and installed at a cost the market will actually pay. Raventos is clear that winning that argument requires more than a lighter structure.
“We want to develop technology that is not only clean but is also sustainable and environmentally friendly,” he says. “The industry still has opposition and so we are trying to bring to the market not only the most cost-effective technology but also the most environmentally friendly.” With DNV certification secured, the PlemCat site cleared, and financing almost completely secured, X1 Wind is approaching the point where that argument stops being theoretical and starts being built, one platform at a time.