September 2020

12 | Plant & Works Engineering www.pwemag.co.uk September 2020 Maintenance Matters Focus on: Remote Maintenance Monitoring I n June 2019, the UK became the first major economy to pass into law its goal of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. As much as this commitment focussed on the introduction of technologies to tackle emissions, it also made the development and continued adoption of green energies more important. The renewed importance of green energy adoption was reflected later in 2019 in the UK Government’s briefing notes for the Queen’s parliamentary speech in December, where a goal was established to increase the UK’s offshore wind capacity to 40 GW by 2030. This extended the already ambitious 30 GW goal set out earlier in 2019, while emphasising the need for offshore wind operators to maintain low costs while increasing capacity. Achieving this growth target will be one of the biggest challenges for operators over the next decade. Although increasing capacity could be as simple as installing more offshore wind turbines, this would lead to high project and operating costs. To reduce the ongoing cost of operations, the UK’s Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult is encouraging offshore wind operators to embrace digitalisation and data. However, an independent survey of key offshore wind stakeholders, commissioned by the ORE Catapult in 2019, highlighted that the industry’s adoption of digital and data-driven technologies is falling behind other energy sectors. Not only this, but almost all respondents believe there is a disparity between how the sector currently operates and how it should be operating to get value from digital technologies. Martin Frederiksen, managing director of offshore embedded computing expert Recab UK commented that his company has seen this begin to change in the past year, as more offshore wind operators have approached them for embedded computing projects. In his view, offshore wind is an ideal sector for digitalisation and the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to improve remote monitoring and minimise operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. One of the biggest contributors to offshore wind energy costs is O&M, due largely to the environmental conditions of offshore operations. Regular maintenance is required, but the remote nature of offshore wind farms means this is not a quick nor cheap process. Operators can use embedded edge computing systems to remotely monitor the health signals of turbines, using a network of sensors in turbines and edge servers to act as gateways for performance data. This allows operators to embrace a condition-based approach to maintenance that reduces overall costs. However, this is only achievable if the data can be collected, processed and transmitted reliably and quickly to engineers. Achieving the necessary level of availability of offshore data requires Embedding digitalisation into offshore wind The offshore wind industry has become one of the UK’s success stories. In the past decade, the industry went from a capacity of 0.3 Gigawatts (GW) of power to 9.7 GW — and also generated almost ten per cent of the UK’s total energy in 2019. However, this success brings similarly high expectations for the future, with a Government target of a 400% increase in capacity by 2030. To achieve this, the sector must accelerate its adoption of digitalisation, explains PWE reports.