Six companies set to improve wind turbine access systems
Six companies have received funding from the Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) programme to advance mechanisms that will safely transfer engineers and equipment onto offshore wind turbines.
According to the Carbon Trust, offshore wind farms are typically less than 25km off the shore in relatively benign sea conditions and consist of up to 100 turbines.
Maintenance is possible in boats around 90 per cent of the time when wave heights are up to about 1.5m.
The new round-three offshore wind projects will be as far as 300km off shore in rougher sea conditions and may consist of as many as 2,500 turbines.
At these sites, today’s access systems would only allow transfers for approximately 210 days a year.
The aim of the access project is to find and commercialise concepts to make transfers possible for a minimum of 300 days a year.
The overall aim of the access project is to increase turbine availability by four per cent through the development of these new technologies. This, according to the Carbon Trust, could cut turbine downtime, saving £3bn of lost generating revenue over the lifetime of round-three wind farms, and help to reduce the levelised cost of offshore wind. This improvement in availability would also save an extra 1.3mt of CO2 per year.
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