Editor's note: This story first appeared in the 2023 Offshore Wind Special Report, which published within the September/October 2023 issue of Offshore magazine.
By Moe Tanabian, Cognite
Developed nations are racing against the clock to reduce emissions by 2050, as set by the Paris Agreement. Offshore wind will be a huge factor in achieving this goal, with the potential to produce more than 2,000 GW of energy in the US, which is twice the generation of the entire electric grid.
While there are ample opportunities for offshore wind, one major obstacle is the maintenance of these turbines. Offshore wind turbines are battered by wind, waves and rain around the clock as they produce clean energy.
Timely, efficient maintenance is critical to ensure that the turbines don’t break down and production doesn’t stop. Offshore wind turbine maintenance is expensive. According to IHS Markit, operations and maintenance (O&M) costs average between $42,000 and $48,000/MW during the first 10 years of a wind turbine’s operations, and a part of these costs include the crew who conducts these checks. For example, Ørsted, one of the largest energy companies in the world, would perform maintenance on turbines by sending crews of four inspection workers. Half of the crew would remain outside the turbine, while the others would enter the confined space to do a visual inspection manually, a resource-depleting and time-intensive process with inherent safety risks from entering an enclosed space.
As Ørsted sought ways to reduce the costs associated with O&M, the company began digitalizing its operations by using a drone to conduct inspections and using software and artificial intelligence on the data collected by the drone. With these technologies, Ørsted was able to speed up inspection time, cut costs and make work safer for maintenance staff.
To implement AI and drones into its operations, Ørsted chose Microsoft and the Industrial DataOps platform, Cognite Data Fusion, to digitalize the offshore wind producer’s maintenance process and enable repeatable drone inspections in confined interior spaces of its monopile wind turbines.
Ørsted’s maintenance technicians fly a drone inside the structure of the wind turbines and collect images and other sensor data. This data is then automatically extracted from the drone provider’s cloud platform and organized in Cognite Data Fusion to provide Ørsted’s domain experts with the necessary information to perform digital inspections.
Powered by Microsoft Azure’s cloud computing services, Cognite enabled Ørsted to run computer vision models on the data to track corrosion and cracks. An important aspect of this project was Cognite’s ability to rapidly scale this solution across other offshore wind parks to provide real measurable value.
By combining drones, industrial expertise, cloud computing services from Microsoft, and Industrial DataOps software from Cognite, Ørsted can turn inspection data into business value.
The new, data-driven approach to inspection gives Ørsted’s technicians a complete overview of developing maintenance issues. Long term this enables the company to reduce the number of technicians needed to conduct maintenance from four to two and eliminates the need to physically enter enclosed spaces within the foundation of the wind turbines.
As the world becomes increasingly reliant on renewable energy sources, like wind power, operators will need access to data to ensure smooth operations and seamless delivery. Drones and dataops are only two of the ways energy companies are collecting and applying their data. Generative AI backed by reliable industrial data will help further amplify these technologies, empowering workers across all levels of the organization to collaborate effortlessly, reducing carbon footprint and improving safety conditions.
