Three of a kind

Mike Farish reports on the lessons that three companies have learned from Rounds 1 and 2

As the UK’s offshore wind industry heads towards Round 3 - and the significant increase in scale and complexity it represents - it needs to ensure that the experience it has gained in Rounds 1 and 2 is not lost. Instead it needs to ensure it is recognised as a resource to be tapped into and utilised to maximise the efficiency with which future expansion is implemented. This was the specific theme of a session at BWEA31 at which three industry representatives summarised the key lessons they have learned in the projects they have carried out so far.

Per Hjelmsted Pedersen, for instance, is director - wind development and construction for DONG Energy. He addressed himself to the company’s experience with the Gun Fleet Sands and Horns Rev II wind farms in the North Sea. The two, he said, presented quite different challenges in terms of their respective environments - most obviously in wind conditions and water depths. But while that made quite distinct demands in each case at a tactical level, for instance in the number of support vessels required, the managerial and logistical methodology remained constant.

Approach
For Pedersen, in fact, the key point is to adopt what he termed an “industrial” approach to the whole business of constructing and commissioning a wind farm. In essence this means a systematic approach to project management whose fundamental objective is to produce a “steady load”, in other words to ensure that there is always a continuous but manageable amount of work at any one time. Think of a project, he said, as a “wind farm factory”.

In addition, said Pedersen, it always necessary to identify possible “synergies”, aspects of different projects where the similar technologies or techniques can be exploited - especially if the projects are taking place simultaneously. Obvious areas in which such synergies might be usefully exploited include types of turbine, installation vessels and procedures, standardisation of design and consequent advantages of scale in procurement.

Meanwhile Alan Thompson, head of renewables for Centrica, drew on his company’s experience with the Lynn and Inner Dowsing wind farms just off the Lincolnshire coast for his presentation. His main point was a positive one. It is possible to build major offshore wind farms “on-time and on-budget”, he started quite emphatically - but only if you have the right people, the right tools and the right approach.

In the case of these two fields progress was, at least on the surface, smooth and uninterrupted. The relevant consents were gained in the third quarter of 2003, just before Centrica itself acquired ownership, and the project began construction in 2006 achieving energisation in February 2008.

Intention
Along the way, though, a major remodelling of the project structure became necessary. As Thompson explained Centrica’s initial intention was to appoint a single prime contractor with responsibility for managing the inputs from other firms involved. But when the company chosen for that role pulled out Centrica instead found itself having to take on the primary project management responsibility.

So, what came out of the steep learning curve that followed? Thompson identified several salient issues.

The first that he mentioned was recognition that the availability of support vessels can be a crucial bottleneck. He even stated that he had wanted Centrica to buy its own vessel, though that idea was rejected by the company’s board - a decision that he suggested was now regretted. The second was that given the variability of off-shore conditions it is probably necessary to build a degree of over-capacity into a wind farm to achieve on-shore delivery targets. The third was the need for a stringent health and safety policy - anything else is, quite simply, “bad for business”.

Interfaces
The sheer complexity of an off-shore wind farm project was also something Thompson emphasised. Centrica had, for instance, identified around 650 possible “risks” caused by the existence of “interfaces” of various sorts - whether with third parties or between different areas of operational expertise. Any off-shore wind farm project is therefore a tough challenge, but with proper planning and management it is a challenge that can be overcome.
Finally a third, equally positive message came from Peter Jones, head of technology for ABB. He recounted his company’s experience installing BorWin 1, a 400MW HVDC offshore converter for the Borkum 2 wind farm in the North Sea roughly 125km off the coast of Germany. The unit has a topside weight of some 3,200 tonnes and the distance at which it stands from the coast makes it unequivocally a “world first”, according to Jones. More pertinently for the future, he said, the project showed that “it will be possible to connect Round 3 wind farms.”

Everything about the project was big - at least in off-shore wind power terms. But, as Jones conceded, installing a structure of this size this far out to sea in water depth of 42 metres would be unexceptional for the oil and gas industry. In short both this project and experience elsewhere demonstrate unequivocally that the ambitions for the off-shore wind industry represented by the Round 3 proposals are realistic and achievable.

www.bwea31.com
www.dongenergy.com
www.centrica.co.uk
www.abb.com