Challenge Areas

The West of Orkney Windfarm needs to fully understand the site to design for site-specific conditions it will be subjected to and avoid the risk of unanticipated failures and poor performance. This includes the seabed, metocean, marine life, and how this may change over the life of the wind farm (for example sea-level rise or more regular and powerful storm events).

The West of Orkney Windfarm will be contracting an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) supplier for wind turbine generator supply and want to ensure optimal performance across the wind farm over its operational life. This begins with turbine and equipment choice and an optimised layout for maximum resource exposure, and progresses to through-life operational strategies and monitoring for maximum uptime and performance.

The West of Orkney Windfarm will be contracting fabrication suppliers for foundations and piles and want to reduce cost and mass, maximise use of the Scottish supply chain, and ensure dependability over the life of the wind farm and beyond. This begins with foundation design and understanding local capabilities, and progresses to ensuring lifetime health, life extension and decommissioning.

To ensure maximised transmission of generated power to shore, it is imperative to have an electrical transmission system that is well designed, properly installed, robust, and that performs well with low losses and minimal requirement for maintenance or repair. This begins with minimal-fault installation of cables, cable monitoring and fault prediction, and extends through the system to the grid connection.

The West of Orkney Windfarm site is in a particularly exposed location, and relatively far from the key supply ports. A core challenge will be getting the major components (XXL monopiles weighing 4,500t and pin pile jackets weighing 5,000t) transported to the site from the various suppliers, and then installed, integrated and commissioned. Vessel choice, supply-chain logistics and storage, and weather prediction, analysis and learning will be key.

The West of Orkney Windfarm is in an exposed location with high wind speeds and sea states, making access challenging. Avoiding the need for access, and innovations that allow access in harsh sea-states, are required. Robotics, vessel design and weather prediction will be key.

Towards the mid-point of the windfarm’s operational life the West of Orkney Windfarm will want to assess options for life-extension ‘as-is', re-powering using future technology, and decommissioning with material recovery and recycling. Decisions taken early on, particularly regarding materials, design, and health monitoring strategy, can help that process and ensure best possible outcomes for the project.

In addition to the challenges above, there may be innovations that cut across multiple challenge categories (e.g. machine learning and advanced weather modelling and prediction) or others that fall outside of those identified but would still aid West of Orkney Windfarm to achieve its objectives. This category is a catch-all category if your solution doesn’t fit into one of the aforementioned challenges.