JIP on installation strategy leads to award at EWEA Offshore 2015

ECN specialists Masoud Asgarpour and Ashish Dewan were awarded the prize at EWEA Offshore 2015 under the category “winner in supply chain, logistics and O&M”. The award was in the context of an analysis of three innovative scenarios for the installation of an offshore wind farm: 

• Breakwaters: in order to attenuate waves to an acceptable level for installation and reduce the downtime significantly; 
• Offshore assembly site: to be used as offshore harbour and reduce the transportation and installation time; 
• Floating transport: as a solution for faster installation of future floating wind farms. 

The results of the simulations in ECN Install compared against a baseline, show that all three concepts reduce the installation time with at least 15%. This significantly helps the industry to move forward..

By the end of 2014 about 2500 offshore wind turbines were installed in Europe and European countries have an ambitious plans to install 30 GW more by 2020. Offshore wind installation contributes approximately to 15% of CAPEX and using traditional installation strategies which are thought to be associated with high financial risk by lenders/ investors (due to overrun of the planning which traditionally is quite sensitive to weather windows). In order to reduce the costs and risks of offshore wind installation, ECN set out to develop an improved planning tool. The “ECN Install” tool  can be used to accurately plan and select the most efficient installation strategy.