ECN’s Specialists Win EWEA Offshore Award

ECN specialists Masoud Asgarpour and Ashish Dewan were awarded the prize at EWEA Offshore 2015 under the category “winner in supply chain, logistics and O&M”.

The award was in the context of an analysis of three innovative scenarios for the installation of an offshore wind farm:

• Breakwaters: in order to attenuate waves to an acceptable level for installation and reduce the downtime significantly;
• Offshore assembly site: to be used as offshore harbour and reduce the transportation and installation time;
• Floating transport: as a solution for faster installation of future floating wind farms.

The results of the simulations in ECN Install compared against a baseline, show that all three concepts reduce the installation time with at least 15%. This significantly helps the industry to move forward.

In 2014, ECN within the Dutch FLOW “industrialize installation” project in cooperation with IHC (as project coordinator), Van Oord and Ballast Nedam (as project participant), developed a logistics and planning tool for offshore wind installation.

ECN Install is a planning tool that can be used for planning of foundation, turbine and cable installation of offshore wind farms. Through this tool, optimized resources for each installation step and optimized execution plans for each specific site and installation strategy can be identified.

Image: ECN