I was referring to floating platforms which can also be used to support wavebob or other water turbines - which would dampen the yaw of the platform - with the above surface element used to support a wind turbine.  I'm not suggesting trying to balance production at a platform level - merely suggesting that if you have a floating platform already built, you might as well use it both above and below the waterline. Of course you may be right in suggesting a mixed load of wind and wave stresses could require a stronger platform that would be more expensive to build.

Index of Frank's Diaries

Ah Jerome, you marvel. I keep trying to find a succinct formulation, to refute all the nonsense about having to balance at the level of one turbine, one wind farm, one technology. And there you've done it in one beautiful paragraph. These words I'll treasure and propagate, with credit where credit's due:

The best place to do a mix of technologies is the grid itself - it is completely inefficient to try to have each producer be a perfectly balanced supplier - better to do the fine tuning of the system at the system-level, where all the individual movements are blended and blunted, and the adaptation effort can be smaller, in aggregate. Jerome a Paris, 2011

At, I believe an ARPA-E event, one of the companies was a developing of 'bag' storage -- inflating bags at the bottom of the ocean when there is excess energy to provide stabilization of power supplies. Can't, at the moment, recall the company (have their material somewhere ...).  Clearly, this is something that could be associated with offshore wind facilities. Now, that would be dual use of cables, no?

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