Abstract
Improving access is a priority in the offshore wind sector, driven by the opportunity to increase revenues, reduce costs, and improve safety at operational wind farms. This paper describes a novel method for producing probabilistic forecasts of safety-critical access conditions during crew transfers. Methods of generating density forecasts of significant wave height and peak wave period are developed and evaluated. It is found that boosted semi-parametric models outperform those estimated via maximum likelihood, as well as a non-parametric approach. Scenario forecasts of sea-state variables are generated and used as inputs to a data-driven vessel motion model, based on telemetry recorded during 700 crew transfers. This enables the production of probabilistic access forecasts of vessel motion during crew transfer up to 5 days ahead. The above methodology is implemented on a case study at a wind farm off the east coast of the UK.
Highlights
Offshore wind is playing a major role in the portfolio of European electricity markets
It is estimated that 20%–30% of the total cost of energy for an offshore wind farm is due to Operations & Maintenance (O&M) in the UK (Crabtree, Zappalá, & Hogg, 2015)
In both cases the target variable is related to a corresponding single input from the Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP) source, e.g. significant wave height to significant wave height, and the target variable is assumed to follow a Gamma distribution, as this was found to be a competitive model during exploratory analysis and in related work (Dowell, Zitrou, Walls, Bedford, & Infield, 2014)
Summary
Offshore wind is playing a major role in the portfolio of European electricity markets. The contribution of this work is in providing an endto-end framework for generating access forecasts based on vessel monition during transfer up to 5 days ahead, including quantifying the uncertainty due to weather conditions To this end, a method is developed to produce probabilistic forecasts of significant wave height and peak wave period using statistical post-processing of NWP. In order to plan and execute maintenance operations, including crew transfer, forecasts of the sea state are required These typically comprise of significant wave height at 1- or 3-hour intervals for a single location in space, representative of the wind farm, for the 48 h. Other factors, such as lightning risk and visibility, are reserved for future work, as well as incorporating information from wave spectra
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