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Improving Safety and Productivity of Offshore Wind Technician Transit SPOWTT

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Project Description

The Safety and Productivity of Offshore Wind Technician Transit (SPOWTT) project seeks to improve both the safety and productivity of offshore wind technician transit. It seeks to do this by developing a launch decision support tool that will improve upon the current launch practice of the marine coordinator. A four hour weather forecast of significant wave height and the capability of the available CTVs are used to decide whether the weather window is sufficient to launch vessels. The weather window is often not as good as expected and less work is done and technicians are exposed to risks at sea unnecessarily.

The project will create a decision support tool that can be used across all existing and potential wind farms by any operator, applicable to any crew transfer vessel, and utilizing any turbine platform. The consortium will progress innovations in five areas to widen the decision making parameters available to improve prediction of the weather window and give greater confidence to the launch coordination, vessel and sea state; human impact; decision making model; operational communications systems; and operational planning tool.

The impact of this tool will be assessed in the offshore environment using working technicians and vessels at wind farms where Siemens has an equity stake in year 1, and farms of other operators in year 2. It will be assessed to see how better it predicts the weather window compared to the existing method.

Project Acronym SPOWTT
Status Project Complete
Funder(s) Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy
Value £191,666.00
Project Dates Dec 1, 2016 - Mar 31, 2020
Partner Organisations Siemens
Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult
BMO Offshore
Maritime Research Institute Natherlands
Specialist Marine Consultants Limited
Stichting Energieonderzoek Centrum Nederland

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