Exploring the impact of innovative developments to the installation process for an offshore wind farm

Abstract

For offshore wind to be competitive with mature energy industries, cost efficiencies must be improved throughout the lifetime of an offshore wind farm (OWF). With expensive equipment hire spanning several years, installation is an area where large savings can potentially be made. Installation operations are subject to uncertain weather conditions, with more extreme conditions as OWF developments tend towards larger sites, further offshore in deeper waters. One approach to reduce the cost of the installation process is to evaluate advanced technologies or operational practices. However, in order to demonstrate cost savings, the impact of these advances on the installation process must be quantified in the presence of uncertain environmental conditions. To addresses this challenge a simulation tool is developed to model the logistics of the installation process and to identify the vessels and operations most sensitive to weather delays. These operations are explored to identify the impact of technological or operational advances with respect to weather delays and the resulting installation duration under different levels of weather severity. The tool identifies that loading operations contribute significantly to the overall delay of the installation process, and that a non-linear relationship exists between vessel operational limits and the duration of installation

A mixed-method optimisation and simulation framework for supporting logistical decisions during offshore wind farm installations

“…In order to address the challenges of larger installation projects and increasing uncertainties, two models have been developed in a collaborative project between industry experts and academics to support logistical decision making at the planning or bidding stage of an OWF installation. These models have been presented previously by the authors (Barlow et al (2014c(Barlow et al ( , 2015; Tezcaner Öztürk et al (2016)). Action research (Lewin, 1946) was the chosen methodology to ensure the models developed were grounded in the challenges facing the OWF developers.…”

Strategic Optimization of Offshore Wind Farm Installation

“…installing separate blades instead of one assembled rotor, a decrease in the installation duration may be made by up to 30 % (Barlow et al, 2015). Another study done by Dowell et al (2013) also showed a significant decrease in delay for lifting operations with higher wind restrictions.…”

“…Research done by Barlow et al (2015) demonstrate through a simulation model that weather window utilization has high impact on logistical operation durations. Vessel development focusing on improving vessel capacity for carrying components is suggested through simulation to have little impact on operation duration reductions.…”

“…The seemingly nice benefit of being able to carry many wind turbines per trip seem to be of small significance. This may be a consequence of the weather sensitive installation lifts being the bottlenecks of the process, as concluded by Barlow et al (2015). After a weather window for installation has ended, a vessel is usually better off returning to a port to reload components rather than waiting for a new weather window.…”

A discrete-event simulation approach to evaluate the effect of stochastic parameters on offshore wind farms assembly strategies

“…Therefore, it might be not able to represent the true probabilistic range of weather conditions of a given year. The method used by (Barlow et al, 2015) to generate synthetic weather time-series is a correlated auto regression model, which follows the approach taken by (Dinwoodie and McMillan, 2013). Synthetic weather series are time series of weather conditions generated from statistical analysis of historical weather data sets.…”