New tech in O&M driving down offshore wind opex/MW

Global average opex per megawatt in the offshore wind sector has fallen significantly over the last eight years and is expected to further decline until 2029, driven by an increasing utilisation of new technologies and innovative solutions in operations and maintenance (O&M).

“With economies of scale and improved efficiency of asset management and O&M services, global average opex per megawatt is expected to decline 20% between 2020 and 2029 on average”, Wood Mackenzie said in its latest report on the global offshore wind O&M market, which is expected to be worth € 10 billion by 2029.

Average opex per megawatt has declined by 44 per cent in Europe over the last eight years. This has been powered by flexible service operation vessels (SOVs), remote operation innovations such as drones, cameras, new digital technologies, and the impact of offshore wind clustering.

Going forward, this trend will continue and will be further boosted by machine learning and deep learning from big data, as well as robotics and autonomous systems that will partially offset labour costs, according to Wood Mackenzie.

Development of novel O&M solutions, especially those using drones and autonomous systems, has gained momentum lately.

Offshore construction specialist DEME recently announced it had conducted series of tests with its partner Sabca on the Belgian Rentel offshore wind farm, where the companies tried out drones and artificial intelligence on various offshore wind farm operations.

DEME and Sabca say that combining autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) and artificial intelligence (AI) brings a strong set of tools to automate operations which are currently being executed by people. Furthermore, this approach is expected to increase safety, lower the impact on the environment in the O&M phase of a project, and contribute to reducing the overall costs.

One of the solutions also being developed is an offshore platform from which uncrewed vessels and drones can perform inspection and maintenance operations on offshore wind farms. The project, called RoboDock, is being developed by Fugro and three partner companies and a research institute, who have been granted € 3.3 million by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO).

Still, the offshore wind sector has a lot of room for improvement when it comes to introducing and using new technologies to its advantage, according to a recent article by Jonas Corné, CEO at Greenbyte, a provider of asset management solutions.

One of these areas is vessel data transparency, as many offshore wind owners and operators still do not consider vessel data in their asset management and performance monitoring analysis, according to Corné. The offshore sector can improve data transparency through collaboration with offshore energy support vessel operators. Site visits are ultimately unavoidable on any offshore wind project, and CTVs, SOVs and other vessels play an essential role in their O&M.

Together with implementing more advanced O&M solutions that can reduce operational costs, AI and other new technologies are able to benefit other segments of the sector, such as stabilising central grids and increase electricity dispatch efficiency already available on the market.

With the installed offshore wind capacity to increase by 37 per cent in 2021 and the sector set to witness massive growth in the next decade, the O&M market will also boom, along with the efforts to reduce operational expenditure.

In the global offshore wind O&M market over the next eight years, which is expected to grow 16 per cent annually, Europe will hold the biggest share as a region, while China will become the biggest single market.

Larger projects with giant wind turbines and grid systems, built farther out at sea, will require new and efficient O&M solutions, and aging wind farms will create a bigger playing field for independent service providers.