Minesto has performed a service intervention on its Dragon 4 tidal power plant in record time, carrying out the recovery, inspection, and redeployment offshore process in 48 hours, the Swedish ocean energy developer reported today, October 15.
Minesto revealed that, after years of improving the process, it had achieved its fastest turnaround to date, with a complete service intervention of a Dragon 4 power plant performed within 48 hours in Vestmannasund, Faroe Islands.
The intervention included recovery, extraction of the nacelle for inspection of the upgraded generator following its first ten weeks of operation, maintenance activities, reassembly, quality and functional checks, and redeployment offshore. The work was carried out during a low-production tidal period.
"The ability to complete a full service operation and return the system to power production in only 48 hours demonstrates a key competitive advantage of our technology," said Martin Edlund, Minesto's CEO.
"High performance is important, but equally important is the ability to maintain the system cost efficiently. Notably, our method does not rely on sophisticated and expensive infrastructure, making it suitable for remote locations and areas of the world without port infrastructure and access to advanced marine engineering capabilities."
Minesto notes that the central feature of the concept is the ability to swap subsystems, such as the nacelle, during short intervention campaigns. By using spare modules, more extensive inspections, maintenance activities and upgrades can be performed onshore without impact on availability and energy yield.
"The successful turnaround demonstrates both the maturity of the Dragon Technology and the efficiency of our operational procedures. Through long-term cooperation with our local contractor SJH Offshore, we have progressively refined our methods through repeated campaigns, and today we can perform advanced service interventions while keeping downtime to a minimum. This capability becomes increasingly valuable as we move towards larger commercial deployments and multi-unit installations," said Bernt Erik Westre, CTO of Minesto.