Windmill energy production has always been an area that fascinated me. If we look further into the industry, we would fine some key areas of the windmill farm operations that direly need rapid innovation in order to keep up with national and international demands for the technology. Interested to learn more, I convinced the very friendly people over at Design Factory Birmingham to give me access to their network and facilities in order to learn more about the windmill operations and maintenance industry. I was hoping to understand key players, learn about challenges and recognize areas we could innovate. That said, I hope to sum up everything I’ve managed to learn during my 4-week program with DFB into this quick 5 min article. All figures and data I’ve quoted are backed by reputable sources, please get in touch if you’d like the references.
O&M or operation and maintenance of windmill farms both offshore and onshore is an industry that’s not just seen rapid growth but also demands huge amounts of innovation to meet the ever-increasing maintenance demands of our windmill farms. But the global offshore wind O&M market is still young and lacks experience in long-term O&M issues and failures. Currently, only 1.8 gigawatts (GW) of global capacity have been operating for over 10 years. By 2029, 90% of the operational fleet, equivalent to 165 GW will still be under 10 years old.
Traditional O&M strategies heavily depend upon trained technicians and or systems that are not capable of inspecting windmill blades quickly and accurately. This does not provide grid operators with an efficient way to inspect blades and collect data. Tackling the problem of collecting reliable data on the health of windmill blades would put grid operators in a position to analyse and accurately plan out maintenance to maximise profitability and minimise windmill downtime. O&M costs are known to account for up to 30% of the price of energy produced by offshore wind farms so reducing the maintenance costs would inevitably mean greater competitiveness of electricity generated by offshore wind turbines in the electricity market. This hopefully leads to an even stronger adaptation of windmill energy by the industry