Cable failures are a serious issue for offshore wind farm owners and operators and account for up to 80% of insurance claims across the sector. This, in turn, means that a vast portion of Operation and Maintenance (O&M) cost is attributed to cable failures, repairs and replacements and the revenue losses associated with these events.
Some developers may prefer a string connection for their array cable topology design, while others may opt for a ring connection. Though a string connection is cheaper in terms of up-front costs, it results in higher revenue losses because a failure of one cable can lead to the loss of power output from all turbines on the string. Whereas, a ring connection is more expensive to build but reduces the risk of revenue losses in the event of a cable failure.
Using the recent developments in COMPASS, an O&M simulation tool developed by engineers at ORE Catapult, this report demonstrates how the up-front costs required for inter-array cable redundancy compare with the revenue losses in scenarios without added redundancy. Read the full report for more information.
This report was written by Techno Economic Analyst Nadezda Avanessova, in the Analysis and Insights team at ORE Catapult.
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