The consultancy and software developer Systecon AB, a company with extensive expertise and experience in operation and maintenance analysis, performs simulations to analyze different logistics concept for East Anglia Offshore Wind, a joint venture between Scottish Power and Vattenfall.
East Anglia Offshore Wind is a joint venture company between Vattenfall and Scottish Power with the purpose to develop the Round 3 development zone East Anglia in the North Sea off the British east coast. It is estimated that once completed the East Anglia project will comprise 7200 MW of installed wind power.
Operation and Maintenance (O&M) of offshore wind power is complicated. A wind farm should obviously be constructed where the wind is strong in order to ensure a good production. However, site conditions set restrictions on the accessibility to perform O&M work on the wind turbines, and a harsher climate normally results in a more expensive O&M solution.
Systecon has been engaged to model and simulate different O&M logistic concepts for the first 1200 MW construction phase of East Anglia.
The wind farm is modelled in Systecons simulation tool SIMLOX and the analyses are based on meteorological data from the planned location, wind turbine data, and data for the alternate O&M resources (e.g. vessels and helicopters) that are currently being considered in the different logistic concepts. Since meteorological data is present and included in the simulation, the wind farm availability can be studied both on a time basis and on an energy basis.
Wind power production varies with the strength of the wind and down times due to maintenance should preferably coincide with low wind periods, hence is the energy based availability arguably the more relevant measure since it takes production into account.
Pär Attermo , O&M Development , Vattenfall Renewables comments:
“As a result of the analyses Systecon performs we can decrease the uncertainty in our calculations and the value this bring in a project as large as East Anglia cannot be underestimated. Our approximation is that £3-6 million can be saved annually by choosing the best logistic concept.”
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Offshore WIND staff, August 29, 2012; Image: eastangliawind