Proserv to monitor cables on Hywind Scotland floating wind farm

Offshore staff

ABERDEEN, Scotland — Proserv will supply its ECG cable monitoring system (CMS) to Equinor’s Hywind Scotland floating offshore wind farm, according to a recent Proserv news release.

Hywind Scotland, which became the world’s first commercial floating offshore wind farm in 2017, is located off the coast of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire in northeast Scotland. 

Proserv is to deliver its CMS to analyze the condition and integrity of export and interarray cables across the wind farm utilizing the fiber-optic cores within the cables. The demonstration, focused on ECG’s data analytics abilities, is scheduled to extend until April 2024 with installation and commissioning set to take place in the third quarter of this year.

ECG offers comprehensive visibility across cable assets as an integrated, scalable and multi-faceted single package.

The technology has been initiated and driven by Proserv with support from its consortium partners Synaptec and BPP Cable Solutions. The Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult also has given its support to the group during the development of the technology.

The CMS employs distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and also engages Synaptec’s distributed electromechanical sensors (DES) via its passive electrical and mechanical sensor systems. The hardware will be complemented by the intuitive human-machine interface, utilizing Proserv’s TIACS software suite.

Critically, Proserv’s ECG can monitor the condition and performance of cable terminations, an aspect needing development in the offshore wind sector. Cable terminations are well-known for being a serious failure point, so this technology will scrutinize this specific key area of an asset.

During ECG’s demonstration on Hywind Scotland, BPP Cable Solutions will provide advanced real-time data processing and predictive analytics modeling, representing a major shift from traditional reactive cable performance monitoring approaches, whereby a cable fault or failure is analyzed from stored data after an event takes place.

This will be achieved by BPP Cable Solutions applying its experience in processing data generated from DTS and DAS as well as Synaptec’s DES and cable connection monitoring technologies. Specialist predictive data analysis tools will be combined with known cable power transmission performance physics to monitor cable arrays continuously and autonomously. This will give assurance of “as designed” cable health and will identify in advance any anomalies and potential longer-term faults that can be dealt with on a proactive basis.

Earlier this year, Proserv secured a contract for ECG to be implemented on the bottom-fixed Dogger Bank Wind Farm phases A and B to monitor the condition and integrity of the asset’s interarray cables, representing the technology’s first commercial sale. Dogger Bank will become the world’s largest offshore wind farm once completed.

 05.18.2022