Time is money offshore. While developing a unique marine management review standard for the renewables sector, Green Marine Solutions (GMS) has been saving valuable minutes for its clients. The results are often a victory for both systems and common sense.
Practical rather than purely academic
Since spring 2014, GMS has been working closely with Belgium-based wind farm developer C-Power in the North Sea. GMS is providing high-quality O&M services at the first offshore wind farm concession in the Thornton Bank area, 30km off the Belgian coastline.
When complete, some 50 turbines will generate circa 1000GWh of power annually – enough to meet the needs of approximately 600,000 people.
The farm will also help to offset the release of some 415,000 tonnes of CO2 annually, equivalent to the carbon dioxide absorption rate of a one third of all the forests in the Flemish region.
While these statistics are impressive, smaller figures are also bringing significant cost savings and efficiency gains during the farm’s construction phase.
Runaway minutes
When GMS first arrived on site, morning vessel departures to the offshore construction site were being delayed by a daily average of 40 minutes.
With a dozen or so skilled offshore technicians on each trip – at a cost of some €300 a day per person – loses over a 365-day working year were mounting swiftly.
GMSs review of boarding arrangements, equipment inspections, boat manifests, warehousing and other key parameters quickly identified the problem’s practical causes.
Now vessels routinely leave 10 minutes early – an overall time gain of some 50 minutes in a 12-hour contracted working day. This is a very welcome saving
Maine management review
GMS is also developing its own detailed Marine Management Review audit format to improve safety, efficiency and cost structures in the offshore renewables environment. New information from live projects such as Thornton Bank is fed directly into the evolving standard.
“We are learning more and more as an increasing number of wind farm operators open their doors to us. That translates into gains for all operators,” says GMS Operations Director, Richard Pargeter .
A purely academic approach can be misleading. “Our aim is to develop a practical standard that takes on board common sense lessons,” he explains.
A typical example that illustrates good intent but bad practice concerned one senior client. He committed a great deal of time researching vessel fuel efficiency, the effects of fastest and slowest speeds and calculating theoretical fuel economy figures.
However, his company also outsourced vessel operations and manifests to a contractor who zigzagged around its wind farm dropping off passengers quite randomly.
The result was unchecked losses of the type that GMS are keen to eliminate.
Always check your real loses and gains
“It essential to ask yourself fundamental questions, such as are we routinely checking our efficiency levels properly? Are we cleaning our hulls and are we removing marine grow?”
“Unless you are covering the very basics, no amount of desktop accounting will help you to make genuine progress. The two go hand-in-hand,” Pargeter adds. Minutes and miles do count.
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