RWE Renewables Orders Machine Learning Tool for Turbine Access

RWE Renewables has placed an order with a UK company Cognitive.Business for a machine learning tool that will improve vessel-to-turbine transfers at operational offshore wind farms.

The tool, called WAVES (Wind Accessibility Verification for Enhanced Safety), enables highly accurate, localised assessment of safe conditions for transfers from vessels to wind turbines and is said to potentially save the offshore wind industry GBP 1 million per installed GW every year.

The solution combines complex met-ocean data, with vessel tracking data, within an automated machine learning model to create a highly accurate predictive tool.

RWE Renewables supported the validation of the WAVES solution by providing real-world operational data and, following a series of trials, the offshore wind farm developer and operator has now placed an order for WAVES.

“Making safe crew transfers is vital to our operational business. The WAVES solution integrates powerful A.I. technology with our own operational data and has been shown to provide an improved transfer decision metric compared to the industry’s standard. We believe that WAVES will enable us to better predict acceptable transfer windows, improving the safety of our technicians, and enabling us to optimise our O&M activities”, said James Vause, Offshore Production Manager RWE Renewables.

Cognitive.Business is developing the WAVES technology as part of their advanced analytics software suite of Discovery, and this is only one of a suite of digital tools being developed by the company to improve operations and maintenance (O&M) decision-making and scheduling, according to ORE Catapult, which is delivering the Offshore Wind Growth Partnership (OWGP) programme that supported the WAVES project development.

“The OWGP identified WAVES as an exciting innovation in the offshore wind sector – eliminating the variances of human decision-making from technician transfers and improving health and safety. By enhancing the accessibility of an offshore wind farm and reducing under-utilised resources, the WAVES solution could save the industry £1M/GW every year”, ORE Catapult said.