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Access Systems 

The Offshore Wind Accelerator Access research area aims to challenge the traditional approach to transferring personnel and equipment from vessels to turbines for carrying out operations and maintenance (O&M) activities. This will become increasingly important as wind farms are developed further from shore in harsher sea conditions. 

In 2010 we ran a global competition to identify innovative ideas to solve the access problem. The rigorous technical review of the 450 applications resulted in 13 designs being considered to have the best technical merits to enable cost reduction. In addition, seven designs were commended for their potential to increase availability of offshore wind farms.

 
 

At an average of 65km from shore, but extending as far as 285km from the coast, future wind farms in Round 3 will be operating in harsh environmental conditions and so servicing turbines will be challenging. The typical size of a wind farm is expected to rise from 30-100 turbines today to as many as 2,500 per site by the end of the decade, and so new O&M strategies and access systems will be needed to service this number of turbines. 

In Stage 1 of the OWA, we developed a model that allows different O&M strategies to be compared.

In Stage 2, we recently ran an open competition to identify and develop new access systems to dramatically improve the  availability of turbines and the safety of people during the transfer to turbines. Competition entries addressed one or more of the access challenges identified, i.e.

  • Vessels – to carry personnel and equipment to the turbines
  • Transfer systems – to safely transfer personnel and equipment from vessels to turbines 
  • Launch and recovery systems – to allow permanent platforms and motherships housing maintenance crews to launch and recover the vessels to carry personnel to turbines.

Access competition - concepts


View Offshore Wind Access competition entries and details of their concepts:

 
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