Member Article

Collaborative £850k programme to boost wind turbine tech

A major industry and Government-lead collaboration programme has launched to develop the performance of wind turbines and make the sector more cost effective.

The Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult and The Crown Estate have committed £850k to the project that will create a database for sharing anonymised offshore wind farm performance and maintenance data

It aims to reduce equipment failures, which cost the industry £150 million in 2012.

SPARTA, as the project is known, was inspired by the offshore oil industry’s long established Offshore Reliability Database known as OREDA.

The National Renewable Energy Centre (NAREC) and ORE Catapult will fund and manage the programme, and firms including Centrica, RWE, SSE, Statkraft and Statoil will participate.

ORE Catapult innovation programmes director Chris Hill said: “Working in close collaboration with The Crown Estate and other key organisations in the offshore renewables sector will enable us to speed up the delivery, commercialisation and scalability of technology innovation. This will help to meet the challenges of harnessing low-carbon power from offshore wind by driving down costs and realising significant economic, social and environmental benefits.

“Building on previous projects within the ORE Catapult, the SPARTA project will, for the first time, produce benchmarking data that has real value to the industry and will contribute to reducing real costs.”

Huub den Rooijen, The Crown Estate’s head of offshore wind, welcomed the progress made to date saying: “With the largest base of operating turbines in the world, the UK offshore wind sector has an unrivalled knowledge base to draw on.

“SPARTA for the first time creates a way for industry to use this to its strategic advantage, providing access to a wealth of information that will enable operators to better understand the performance of their wind farms and where there might be opportunities for cost reduction.”

A pilot project will run until March 2015 after which a full-scale implementation of the reporting system is planned.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .