ORE Catapult: Setting Suitable Standards Key to Cutting Offshore Renewables Cost

When I was a trainee engineer coming into the nationalised electricity industry, I worked with experienced professionals, most of whom had done something in the world of standards – specifying the type of plant the industry should be procuring and using.

Over decades of experience, the quality of the standards got higher and higher, and by the time privatisation came along everything was gold-plated – the accusation was “too expensive”. However, the depth of knowledge that had gone into designing power plant was phenomenal.

There is something about that depth of involvement in setting suitable standards today that is missing in the offshore renewables industry. The level of involvement from the ongoing users is no longer what it used to be.

I believe there is now an opportunity for the industry to get round the table and work together to help design the type of plant that they want to buy and operate in the future.

This is a very young industry, especially in wave and tidal. Whilst we have some fantastic, valuable projects out there in terms of wind farms already generating and prototypes of wave and tidal devices, we don’t know everything that needs to be done in terms of design and future performance, reliability and health and safety. There is always stuff to learn, more to do and build upon.

I’d like to see the industry, particularly the owners, get round the table a lot more to help define the standards of the types of plant that they need. The Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult can be a key enabler with that.

This would start with the deployment of standards across all the engineering competencies that are required. When you have standards, you run the plant more safely because everything is more generic; you control your costs better because you take any expensive bespoke design aspects out of a power plant, and actually allow more innovation to take place because SMEs and other players can say “now I know the narrow playing field, I can see where I can innovate into and design a solution for”.

All of our offshore wind farms so far have been bespoke designs – different depths of water, different ground conditions, different types of turbine with different foundations and different electrical connections. So one of ORE Catapult’s pilot projects is focusing on how we can look at some of this low-hanging fruit and standardise some of these very basic things.

Take an example of cables and the connection of these cables to the wind turbine tower – almost every such offshore development so far has designed it differently. That represents considerable R&D costs duplicated on an aspect of a turbine that should be a utility product offering no differentiation to the operator.

Or another basic example: what’s the best way to take an operator from a boat and put him safely on to the landing platform around a turbine? There are all sorts of different approaches to that, and one thing the industry needs to do is consolidate its thinking, so that you have consistency across all of these projects and make it a safer environment.

In conventional generation that’s largely what you’ve got. You go to two gas plants and their operational and safety procedures will be similar if not absolutely identical.

The ORE Catapult is about promoting innovation and in doing so making design, deployment and operation of offshore power plants more comparable with conventional generation.

That means having a lot more data, and a big part of our role will be in collecting this in key areas like performance and reliability – and making sure that’s shared across the market whilst learning from mistakes via sharing of knowledge and creation of accepted standards.

If we can become the catalyst for achieving these things, then we will create the right platforms to support the industry and to promote innovation, bringing better technological solutions to the industry.

We have some ambitious targets to achieve in offshore renewable energy generation, not least achieving a 30-40% cost reduction in little more than six years. But I genuinely believe that this is achievable, and making rapid progress on setting standards across the industry will be a significant contributing factor.

ORE Catapult will play a leading and facilitating role in this, but it will only achieve it through extensive collaboration from all of the major players in the industry. We don’t need to gold plate, but we do need standards!

Press release, November 12, 2013; Image: ORE Catapult