Centrica commissioned Jee to identify scenarios that could lead to premature failure of the subsea power cables on the Lynn and Inner Dowsing offshore wind project given different environmental conditions and amounts of seabed scour around the base of the wind turbine foundations.
Jee’s business development manager, Gary Howland, said reducing lifetime costs and “levelised” costs of energy for offshore wind farms was the key to make them more competitive with other forms of energy generation.
Using OrcaFlex software, a powerful analysis tool for subsea risers, pipelines, umbilicals and cables, Jee modelled the cables to assess loads and movements that could potentially cause premature failure.
The Jee team then provided critical information about which cable scenarios are at risk of failure.
Centrica will use this information to decide if any cables are required to be made safe with remedial works, mitigating the risk of a future failure and avoiding the costs associated with loss of energy production and cable replacement.
The Lynn and Inner Dowsing project is two adjacent wind farms built 5km off the Lincolnshire coast, east of Skegness.
Together, they have an installed capacity of 194 megawatts, enough power to meet the annual demand of more than 130,000 homes.
Jee performed similar assessments on other operational wind farms such as Barrow and Robin Rigg, on which the scope went one step further with “real time” monitoring of cable movements to validate and calibrate the engineering models.
The company also recently provided Technip Offshore Wind with valuable information about the safest and most efficient way to install the cables on the Gunfleet Sands 3, Borkum West and Westermost Rough projects, minimising installation costs and reducing the risk of cable damage during offshore operations.
