This is the third in a series of posts highlighting Quoceant’s engineering expertise within the offshore wind and wider marine energy sectors. Here our IDCORE Research Engineer, Leigh Baxter, shines a spotlight on our weather downtime analysis skills.
Image source: maps.maine.gov.scot - annual mean significant wave height
Offshore wind deployments are set to increase rapidly as countries globally aim to achieve climate targets. Current installation methods for floating platforms are extremely sensitive to weather window availability, particularly at the hook-up stage when connecting the mooring and electrical systems to the floating structure. As part of our Offshore Wind Growth Partnership (OWGP) project, Quoceant have been investigating how the ability to reduce the offshore operation duration, and increase the metocean operational limits, impacts the duration installation vessels spend waiting for suitable weather. This is known as the weather downtime, which can be a considerable portion of the overall campaign duration and cost of installation.
This investigation was carried out utilising JBA Consulting’s ForeCoast Marine software, where the installation processes were simulated against 30-year ERA-5 metocean data from selected ScotWind locations. Software such as ForeCoast Marine allows Quoceant to simulate generalised installation, maintenance, monitoring and decommissioning strategies as well as specific case studies and make direct comparisons between them.
Quoceant's weather downtime analysis draws conclusions which quantify operational metocean risk for different sites, approaches and technologies. This kind of analysis is key to highlighting potential limitations of an offshore operation, where bottlenecks may be, and the most efficient and cost-friendly way of tackling them.
To learn more about Quoceant’s engineering services including; weather window analysis, rapid prototyping, concept design, analysis, evaluation and review, get in touch: info@quoceant.com.