Our Operations and Maintenance Centre of Excellence (OMCE), based in the Humber, specialises in helping UK businesses create and commercialise technologies for the offshore renewables sector. The Centre has a portfolio of more than 70 research and innovation projects that represent a total investment of £40 million in UK innovation. They address a variety of urgent O&M priorities, including data and digitalisation, robotics and automation, health and safety, and lifetime extension of turbines and components.

Our Floating Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence (FOWCoE) aims to develop an internationally recognised initiative to reduce the cost of energy from floating wind. The centre helps to accelerate the build-out of floating wind farms, create opportunities for the UK supply chain, and drive innovations in manufacturing, installation and O&M. Now boasting 19 leading industry partners, it has been at the heart of cutting edge research to develop pathways towards helping the UK unlock the full potential of floating offshore wind technology.

The SPARTA project is the leading service for benchmarking performance and reliability in offshore wind across the UK. It offers owners and operators of offshore windfarms the ability to understand and quantitatively compare themselves against their peers. SPARTA gives offshore wind operators access to a wealth of unprecedented insight into industry availability and reliability – information that is otherwise kept siloed due to its high commercial sensitivity. Using ORE Catapult as an unbiased custodian of the data and a standardised methodology agreed by all, members can securely submit data on windfarm performance, operation and reliability and receive insights in return.

Circular Economy in the Wind Sector, a joint industry programme, is building the body of knowledge required to establish standard practice and guidance for the decommissioning of offshore wind farms so that the sector may avoid the expensive and lengthy trial-and-error processes experienced by the oil and gas industry. The CEWS JIP is open to new members joining and we are keen to hear from supply chain companies wanting to support the development of a circular economy for the wind sector.

ELECTRODE is designed to track subsea cable failure and identify trends, give insight to aid maintenance and condition monitoring, provide trusted insight and trended data, and improve insight to cable reliability. All of this will, in turn, inform innovation and best use of technology, improve efficiency and drive down costs, and also provide hard evidence for insurers and investors. Anonymity is a key principle of the platform, which greatly reduces the risk to owners and operators who take part.