EDS is a global leader in HV asset management for offshore wind farms (OWF). In the OWF, newly commissioned engineering projects often experience failures either in the initial years of operation or at the end of their lifecycle. Statistics show that a OWF cable circuit of average length is likely to experience 1-2 faults per 20-year period. Insurance companies increasingly report on HV cable faults being a major issue for financial losses at OWFs. They led to insurance claims totalling more than €60 million in 2015. On average, at least 10 subsea cable failures are declared to insurers each year in the OWF sector. The financial severity of these incidents continues to grow such that they account for 77% of the total global cost of OWF losses. Our CableSENTRY service offering is an innovative solution based on DAS technology that detects subsea cable faults in real time. Acoustic signals from the HV cable create an optical response in a fibre optic cable so faults and other events can be located accurately and immediately on a calibrated system. Applied in addition to existing fault location technology, our solution will be able to identify fault locations in land and subsea HV cables and save an average of 4 days’ downtime per fault over current methods.
Importance for the Society: Total installed OWF capacity in Europe now stands at 11,538 MW across 82 sites in 11 countries. The European OWF industry attracted a record €14 billion in new investments during the first six months of 2016. In June 2016, energy ministers from 9 European countries signed a MoU and Work Programme to enhance their cooperation on OWF. In parallel, 11 energy companies signed a declaration to reduce OWF costs to below €80/MWh by 2025. This assumes an annual build-out of 4-7 GW of OWF from 2021 onwards. As the number of OWFs are increasing, social pressures towards cleaner energy generation and geographical limits mean OWFs are being located further offshore. Moreover, based on growing energy demand and dependency on offshore produced renewable energy, submarine power cables have become essential for reliable electric power supply and often can be classified as critical infrastructure. CableSENTRY can provide a monitoring solution for cable lengths up to 94 km which covers new further OWFs.
Overall Objective: To conduct two sets of large-scale customer trials that shall demonstrate the technical advantages over the current deployed technology and ensure all technical and commercial targets are hit prior to market entry.
Conclusions of the action:
Technical (Objective 1): The final product specification met the requirements of our trial partners. During the project whilst gathering a large quantity of data on asset condition, EDS have formulated a plan to further develop CableSENTRY to become a platform technology incorporating several condition monitoring data streams.
Customer Trials (Objectives, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6): Following twelve trials on eight separate OWFs, our trial partners have acknowledged the potential benefits and commercial impacts that CableSENTRY can bring with respect to asset condition monitoring over the state of the art.
Commercial (Objectives 7, 8 & 9): Following completion of customer trials, the CableSENTRY value proposition, pricing structure and service offering has been presented to our target customers and initial sales are expected to begin in Q4 2019. IP relating to patents and trademarks have been filed to further underpin the commercial outcomes of this project.
