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.