Proserv to monitor cables on world’s first floating wind farm

Proserv has been hired to supply its Electro Cable Guard (ECG) cable monitoring system (CMS) Equinor’s Hywind Scotland, also known as the world’s first commercial floating offshore wind farm, located off the coast of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire.

Courtesy of Equinor

Under the contract, Proserv will deliver its CMS to analyse the condition and integrity of export and inter-array cables across the wind farm utilising the fibre optic cores within the cables.

The demonstration is focused on ECG’s data analytics abilities and is scheduled to extend until April 2024. Installation and commissioning are set to begin in the third quarter of this year.

The ECG technology was initiated and driven by Proserv backed by its consortium partners Synaptec, a power system monitoring expert, and BPP Cable Solutions, specialists in subsea power cable engineering and management.

The Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult (OREC) also supported the group during the development of the solution.

As explained, during ECG’s demonstration on Hywind Scotland, BPP Cable Solutions will provide real-time data processing and predictive analytics modelling, said to represent a major shift from traditional reactive cable performance monitoring approaches, whereby a cable fault or failure is analysed from stored data after an event takes place.

“We are most grateful to Equinor for enabling us to supply our ECG cable monitoring solution to the Hywind Scotland wind farm and to display the potential and power of this technology, including its data analytics capabilities”, said Paul Cook, business development director of Renewables at Proserv.

Proserv’s ECG will be also implemented on the bottom-fixed Dogger Bank Wind Farm phases A and B, set to become the world’s largest offshore wind farm once completed.

Under the deal, representing the technology’s first commercial sale, Proserv will monitor the condition and integrity of the asset’s inter-array cables.

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