ABPmer has supported a study by Offshore Wind Innovation Hub (OWIH) into potential operation and maintenance (O&M) costs for floating offshore wind. As part of their Industry Insight Series, the Hub’s new report ‘Floating wind: Cost modelling of major repair strategies’, looks at options for these repairs, estimated at 23% of annual O&M costs.
The focus of the work has been ‘Major Repairs’, defined as any corrective action which, if occurring on a bottom-fixed offshore wind farm, would require the use of a jack-up or heavy lift vessel.
The study provides a comparison of the costs of employing either an offsite (tow to port) or onsite (fix in-situ) approach. Scenarios tested included regional location, distance offshore, severity of seasonal weather conditions and different types of floating OWF sub-structures (Spars, Semi-submersibles and Tension Leg Platforms).
In their analysis, OWIH used ABPmer’s Weather Downtime Express (WTDX) to test the scenarios. WDTX is an automated service which identifies the likely amount of weather downtime periods during a sequence of marine operations. The service uses operational task lists (and associated working limits of vessels and equipment) to perform a sequential simulation of available weather windows, based on global datasets of marine weather and sea states back to 1979.
