Recently, floating wind has enjoyed much public and governmental attention and is commonly identified as a crucial next step on the route to net zero targets for many countries. However, there is currently a large gap between the scale and readinesslevel of devices in the water and the end-of-the-decade aspirational targets of many governments. To facilitate the expansion of the industry, a wider acceptance and agreement of the realistic potential of floating wind and the barriers to the sector's development is required, particularly over this crucial 10-year period, something currently scarce in published literature. In this work, a stakeholder engagement was performed, with subsequent analysis of the results to quantify industry expectations and identify the predominant technical and financial concerns of key stakeholders.The presented results of the work serve to both provide a point of comparison and updated account of industry-based expert views in the near term, with further scientific analysis investigating distinctions between different stakeholder types.Secondarily, the key concerns of industry were analysed and compared with a literature review of recent research effort within floating wind, providing a high-level gap analysis. A knowledge of the gaps can inform future areas for academic enquiry, ensuring the future needs of industry and the focus of research is aligned.

The accessibility of offshore wind farms is a key parameter when considering the cost of the operations and maintenance (O&M) of wind farm assets. Indeed, the weather limits for accessing wind turbines is a critical input in many tools which seek to simulate and optimize O&M activities. To refine this input, numerical modelling has been performed previously to perform workability analyses for service operation vessels with motion compensated walk to work gangways. However, previous modelling effort has employed an implicit representation of a gangway, which does not consider the relative motion of gangway subcomponents. In this study, two different gangway representations are employed for a numerical simulation of a transfer procedure between a service operation vessel and an offshore turbine. Comparison of the limiting wave heights given by analysis of the implicit and explicit representation of the gangway shows a difference when considering waves incident toward the vessel from the foundation location, with much lower wave heights allowed by the complex representation. Applying this difference in operational wave heights to a case study location leads to a difference in overall site availability of over 9%. The implications of these findings on future accessibility analysis and foundation design are discussed.

No abstract