As we've discussed many times before, offshore wind represents an enormous opportunity for clean energy, but some of the best resources are out in deep water, where sinking a shaft straight into the sea bed becomes prohibitively expensive and difficult.

Floating offshore platforms offer an alternative, but the engineering challenges here are enormous. A typical 14-megawatt offshore turbine, for example, might place a 500-ton nacelle on top of a 130-meter (427-feet) tower, spinning three 108-meter (354-feet) long carbon blades into the full force of a gale out at sea.

Balancing a monster pinwheel like that on a floating base is no mean feat, and doing it in a way that can easily be manufactured, installed and deployed at low cost? Well, that's a billion-dollar problem that many companies are racing to solve.