In the port of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, a structure is taking shape that will be towed out to sea and anchored a hundred metres deep sometime between late 2026 and early 2027. It’s the prototype for the WHEEL project, short for Wind Hybrid Esteyco Evolution for Low-carbon solutions, and it’s the largest Spanish floating offshore wind prototype built to date: six megawatts of capacity on an “evolved spar” platform, designed to cut size, materials and carbon footprint compared with traditional spar structures.
The project is led by the Spanish engineering firm Esteyco alongside an international consortium, backed by the European Commission through the Horizon Europe programme and with the involvement of the Japanese energy group JPower, one of Japan’s major electricity players. The approved initial budget stands at €25.6 million, of which €16.6 million comes from a direct EU grant, according to Esteyco executive Carlos García Acón, who presented the project.
Once installed at the Plocan test site, the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands, the structure will operate under real conditions for a planned period of up to ten years, around which several research and development initiatives will be built. The stated goal is to see how the technology actually performs at sea, not just in a lab: structural integrity, behaviour under load, maintenance, everything that separates a prototype from a commercial wind farm.
Gran Canaria wasn’t picked at random. The island has positioned itself in recent years as one of Europe’s hubs for floating offshore wind development, helped along by the Blue Supply Chain project, which through the first half of 2026 kept strengthening the local supply chain by coordinating government bodies, companies, ports and research centres. At the WindEurope 2026 trade fair, the Canary Islands got to showcase how far the regional ecosystem has come, work aimed at pulling in investment and expertise in a sector still in its industrial infancy.
It isn’t the only project moving forward in the archipelago. Tenerife is processing a proposal for a wind farm of between 200 and 250 megawatts, expandable to 300, explicitly framed as a technological and industrial proving ground before bigger developments elsewhere. These numbers are still far from those of the big offshore wind farms in northern Europe, but for an archipelago historically dependent on fossil fuels shipped in from elsewhere, every additional megawatt generated locally carries a different kind of weight, both for energy and for supply security. It remains to be seen how quickly these prototypes can translate into capacity actually connected to the grid, a step that in floating offshore wind, globally, has so far proven slower than expected.
