Failures & Replacements – A Barrier to Growth in Offshore Wind?

 Abstract

Everyone is used to seeing graphs predicting unprecedented growth for the offshore wind industry over the next decades. Whether or not these ambitious goals are achieved remains to be seen, as it will require nothing less than an industrial revolution in offshore construction and installation. Never have such growth projections been backed by a global sense of urgency, but unfortunately, it is not just the growth challenge that has to be met and resolved.

Data from insurance companies show a significant growth in financial losses in the offshore wind industry. For an expanding industry, an increase in insurance claims may be a result of the growth, however, even when normalizing the financial losses against industry CAPEX, number of turbines, or installed capacity, worrying trends are seen. For offshore wind to be a viable energy source in the future, the quality of design, installation and operation needs to improve significantly. Furthermore, the industry cannot continue to scale developments until it has overcome some serious reliability issues.

In offshore wind, we have seen how an extreme focus on reducing CAPEX in projects has led to low-quality engineering and choice of sub-standard products that are not fit for long-term applications exposed to dynamic loading in marine environments. Standardization is needed, reflecting the best insight, experiences, methods, and tools.

Although the challenges were never as extensive in oil and gas as in offshore wind today, the situation still resembles the quality and technology challenges faced by the offshore oil and gas industry some two decades ago. Many of the design challenges that have been overcome in oil and gas have been incorporated into codes, standards, and well-established engineering practices. Seen from a distance, the offshore wind industry experience similar trends. However, with the ongoing rapid growth, the learning and improvement processes need to be accelerated by leveraging the experiences from oil and gas. On the shoulders of a mature offshore industry and today’s digital capabilities, standardization and up-scaling of offshore wind have better opportunities than oil & gas had 25 years ago. However, to leverage this opportunity a true life-of-field approach is required

Authors

Peter Jenkins
Chief Executive Officer at 4Subsea

Lars Frøyd
Lead Engineer at 4Subsea

Jan Muren
Senior Advisor