Offshore wind is increasingly contributing to the UK’s energy mix. An installed base of more than 2,500 turbines across 52 wind farms supplied around 17% of the UK nation’s electricity last year; a percentage rate that’s increasing. Maintaining that supply means that the operations and maintenance (O&M) workload is also increasing. But with vessel availability still tight could uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) ease the O&M burden?
Finding and predicting faults
Innovative ocean data company XOCEAN is helping wind farm operators understand the health of their turbine foundations, inter-array cables and export cables, finding faults and providing the data to help predict them before they happen.
It’s doing so by supplying high quality data using small uncrewed vessels. They come with lower human, carbon and operational overheads, and allow for greater flexibility and resource and time efficiency than their crewed alternatives, with guaranteed high quality data deliverables.
