Digitalisation; what's the issue?
Edition 3 | 2022 | Article 1
The situation
Despite the aftermath of COVID-19, 2021 saw 21.1 GW of offshore wind reach grid connections worldwide, three times more than in 2020, setting a new record in the offshore wind industry1.
With both mature and emerging markets growing their offshore wind capacities exponentially, our experience shows that significant and fast-paced growth leads to challenges in construction, the maintenance of core components, and the driving of efficiencies into processes.?
The biggest driving factor within renewables is the need to drive costs down. Being able to mitigate against the loss of production, replacement costs and reduction against annual offshore inspection costs are all elements where digital solutions can assist.
What's the issue?
Although fantastic to witness such great progress and commitment to achieving net zero targets, a vast array of assets have been unsystematically monitored, managed, and maintained.?
The sector needs to be able to reduce costs associated with the maintenance of wind farms, in order to help drive down the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE).
But how do we do this?
Reactive operations and maintenance (O&M)
The industry’s current, immature level of O&M evolution is very much a reactive model; once a failure has occurred, an intervention is implemented. The reactive model is based on the idea that service providers?tend to ‘fly in to save the day’ once something has failed, rather than engaging in any sort of pre-outage failure prediction.
The net result is a loss of production and revenue and costs to remediate. This model becomes particularly acute as warranties expire across an asset, also revealing many discrepancies in lifespan expectations based on comparisons with onshore performance or lab test results2.
All the gear, no idea
An offshore wind farm generates significant volumes of data from assets, people and the environment3. However, the vast volumes collected are generally not used to the best of its potential in improving the performance of the assets. Data science can play a huge part in the effective O&M of offshore wind; knowing how to use your data and analyse it correctly is key.
Everyone is sensitive about making data available – but knowledge is power!?So how can we utilise the data sensitively and make it meaningful?
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Bill Ballew, Head of Innovation at James Fisher Asset Information Services says:
“Data acquisition and ownership issues vary greatly between offshore wind and oil & gas:?offshore wind tends to be a difficult data space to work in due to the tendency to keep data ownership tightly held and data itself proprietary; oil & gas sometimes presents the opposite challenge, with overwhelming amounts of data pouring out of potentially hundreds of legacy systems.?
However, despite these differences, both industries are challenged by putting their available data to use in a digitally mature way to make beneficial business decisions.”
The ‘digitalisation’ buzzword
In order for the industry to sustain the hefty growth of renewable energy production, it’s no secret that digitalisation will inevitably support this transition. However, knowing which technology and areas to digitise is hugely challenging, with somewhat conflicting evidence published across the industry.
Don’t mention oil and gas!
Offshore renewables would simply not exist if it wasn’t for oil and gas. The technology propelling us towards a green power future exists because of the decades of innovation that has come before.
In a market where we are looking to reduce the LCoE, we need to implement data solutions as quickly as possible. Rather than reinventing the wheel, using the tools and lessons learned from oil and gas will allow us to do this cost effectively. Our roots are in oil and gas, which brings a wealth of experience and expertise.
Stay tuned for the next article: Digitalisation; addressing the challenge
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