Space Data for Offshore Wind Farm and Vessel Management

Why Offshore? 

Offshore wind farms contribute to the diversification of energy sources, reducing reliance on fossil fuels. This diversification is crucial for creating a more resilient and sustainable energy mix, helping to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Offshore wind farms generate electricity without emitting greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. This helps reduce overall carbon emissions and combat climate change by providing a clean and renewable energy source. 

This upward trajectory is also catalysed by several other advantageous pull factors. Offshore wind farms typically have higher capacity factors, meaning they generate a larger proportion of their maximum potential power output. This is due to the more consistent and stronger wind resources found at sea, resulting in more reliable electricity generation.  

Space Data for Vessel Management and Offshore Wind Farms 

OSCAR

Our space data service, OSCAR, will combine weather data, ship tracking data & met ocean data to offer truly unique dataset for offshore wind farm operators and stakeholder alike. 

By combining the various space based EO datasets from AAC Clyde Space satellites with ancillary data required for wind farm management within a decision-making platform, OSCAR will provide a comprehensive situational awareness across wind farm sites service that offers benefits over existing products on the market.

What Are the Offshore Operational Challenges? 

While offshore wind power is more difficult and expensive than land-based engineering, the greater abundance and consistency of offshore wind offsets these difficulties.  

The design, manufacture and operation of offshore wind assets have their own set of challenges including corrosion, fatigue, erosion, lightning strikes and biofouling. Addressing these challenges and maintaining the operational availability of offshore wind turbines will become increasingly important as the reliance on offshore wind energy grows. 

The distance to shore of modern wind farms continues to increase with rough seas and longer journey times making work extremely demanding and the logistics of construction and maintenance of offshore infrastructure is complex. To effectively plan for construction and O&M activities, accurate weather, vessel management and tracking, and met ocean data is required. 

Guard vessels are also needed to ensure that project sites are free from other maritime traffic, including fishing, that make risk safety or damage subsea infrastructure. As engineering develops larger turbines, able to generate more power, these must be spaced further apart and so the areas to be covered are progressively increasing. The growth in both new installations and operational capacity is creating a rapidly rising demand on the vessels and crews used to install and maintain wind farms. 

OSCAR Addresses Operational Challenges

The Offshore wind farm developers and operators are faced with several challenges with the current data streams available for weather and met ocean parameters, one such challenge is the significant financial cost. OSCAR will aim to improve the resolution of the data as well as reducing costs to access the data.   

Together with planning information, including met ocean data, weather forecasts and vessel tracking, OSCAR will ensure safety of operations and reduce maintenance costs by ensuring the idle time of vessels is limited as well as minimising turbine downtime to provide more yield from turbines and maximise revenue generation.    

Safety of operations, for staff and equipment, is an important consideration for operators. During construction, assets and associated vessels are vulnerable to accidental damage caused by other maritime users, this is particularly pertinent during the period where cables are being laid and connected. Site security and resilience are therefore also key issues. Current means of tracking maritime vessels within the wind farm consist of installing a radar system on the turbines and by patrolling the area with guard vessels. OSCAR will create a service to track offshore vessels which have the potential to damage assets within the wind farms and will offer lower CAPEX as no radar is needed on the turbine.