Roberto Longo, Senior Consultant, Longitude Engineering, will be presenting “CABLE INSTALLATION ANALYSIS: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE” at The Royal Institute of Naval Architects (RINA) on the 28th February 2019.
Power cables typically account for 10% of the construction cost of offshore wind farms but create 80% of insurance claims, with around 60% relating to damage during construction. One of the reasons for this is that the past there was a lack of appreciation of vessel dynamics in difficult environmental conditions in the design phase. To address this, insurers and Marine Warranty Surveyors have “raised the bar” over the years and now demand more detailed analysis, including dynamic simulations of the operations, to reduce the risk of damaging the cable during the installation.
This is even more important now because the number of turbines in an offshore wind farms has grown tenfold over the last 10 years, which means that the number of array cables to be installed has also significantly increased. Developers still want their windfarms constructed in a reasonable timeframe, which means that contractors are no longer able to limit construction to the summer months and are pushed to increase design sea-state limits of the cable lay operations in order to reduce the downtime.
This presentation will provide an overview of how the analysis methodology changed over the years, looking also at future ways of reducing the risk.
This event is available to all please email london.rina44@gmail.com.
