The era of big data has dawned, and with it a realisation that digitalisation brings better and more efficient ways to support offshore wind operations and maintenance (O&M) decision-making. One of the offshore wind sector’s largest, unsolved challenges is the cost-effective monitoring and tracking of wind turbine performance losses.
Concepts such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning can often seem futuristic at best, and the value of these technologies is currently far from unilaterally understood in offshore wind.
The founders of Cognitive.Business Ltd have experience working with data from offshore wind assets from the inception of the industry. The London-based company has created solutions that have saved hundreds of millions of pounds using intelligent sensing and machine learning technologies. Cognitive strives to build AI solutions to help owner/operators discover the full value of their data, people and assets, ultimately aiming to make offshore wind power generation safer, more efficient, and reliable.
Cognitive has introduced its Wind AITM technology to help overcome the challenge of finding a cost-effective, hyper-accurate solution for the detection and tracking of wind turbine performance losses, with the technology providing real-time, ultra-high resolution detection of those loses. Using AI allows information to be generated quickly, accurately, and intelligently. The Wind AITM solution helps customers to navigate a complex problem, empowering decision-making and transforming productivity with its advanced machine learning technology.
Wind AITM is enabling wind farm owner/operators to access performance health data instantly. It can accurately identify degradation with less than a 1% error, supporting identification of performance degradation shown down to below a 10kW resolution. This quantum leap in real-time accuracy means that Wind AITM can provide a unique opportunity to optimise operations and maintenance.
In cold hard numbers: implementing Cognitive’s Wind AITM system is expected to save a 400MW offshore wind farm £3.5m/year because it can identify currently undetectable performance losses.
ORE Catapult support is enabling the further development of the Wind AITM technology through our industry knowledge and expertise in testing and demonstration. We are also validating the technology with state-of-the-art Lidar performance testing. ORE Catapult will also provide strategy support on the product’s route-to-market and product roadmap by disseminating the research outcomes to key stakeholders.
The Catapult has also helped to promote Cognitive within the offshore wind sector, giving them exposure at major industry events such as Global Offshore Wind 2019 and assisting with networking opportunities.
Through working with ORE Catapult, Cognitive has won support from the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership (OWGP) for their Wind Accessibility Verification for Enhanced Safety (WAVES) project. WAVES aims to enable highly accurate, localised assessment of safe conditions for vessel to turbine transfers. According to accessibility modelling from industry benchmark data (from ORE Catapult) combined with O&M costs (from partner RWE), a staggering £156m of resources are wasted due to inaccessibility each year. The WAVES project looks to reduce these losses by approximately 15%. Cognitive has entered into a partnership with RWE and James Fisher Marine Services to develop their unique data-led tools further.
