Condition monitoring of offshore power cables can help wind farm operators with predicting problem areas and ultimately saving money and time. There are already innovative technologies from Omnisens, HVPD, IPEC and Lios Technology to reduce O&M costs for future installations. Download the full article about "Monitoring Cable Condition on Offshore Wind Farms" for free here: http://bit.ly/Article_cableCondition

1. Industry Article
Monitoring Cable Condition on
Offshore Wind Farms

2. www.offshore-cabling.com
Monitoring of the condition of subsea power cables on offshore wind farms is an area that is receiving
a great deal of attention in the industry, as it has significant potential to reduce O&M costs for future
installations.
The UK Government has set ambitious targets for the offshore wind industry, targeting a 25% reduction
in O&M costs by 2020 with the aim of making power generated offshore more affordable, and therefore
viable. The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published a Levelised Cost of
Electricity model which predicts the total cost of energy over the 20 year life cycle of a typical 500MW+
wind farm. The model predicted that the current cost is equivalent to £135 per MWh, and set the target
of reducing this to £100 per MWh.
The wind industry is working towards these targets in a variety of ways, and the reduction of O&M
costs will be a significant contributor to lowering CoE. Cable faults are one of the most common, and
expensive, reasons for power outages on offshore wind farms, and the cost of repairs can quickly rise
into the millions if extended delays are incurred. Cable repairs have accounted for in excess of 70% of
insurance claims made on offshore wind farms to date, and the use of monitoring systems offers the
potential to drastically reduce that figure by accurately predicting when preventative maintenance can
be carried out to avoid unplanned outage.
As wind farms grow in size and move to deeper water, this issue becomes ever more important, and a
number of new technologies are being developed with the aim of providing the monitoring capability and
the raw data necessary to implement a preventative regime.
Omnisens DITEST Monitoring Technique
Omnisens has a history of providing monitoring systems for the oil and gas industries, and has developed
DiTeSt – a fiber optic distributed sensing technology which can be used to measure temperature or
strain, or both, using the same fiber optic cable.
Although the system is able to monitor both temperature and strain using the same fiber, when
installation conditions dictate, it can also measure both using separate fibers operating on the same
instrument. For temperature monitoring, the optical fiber is installed within protective loose tubing
thereby preventing strain conditions from having a significant effect on temperature measurements.
For strain monitoring, a dedicated strain sensor is required in order to transfer strain to the fiber. The
DiTeSt system has a high dynamic range and measurement performance can be maintained with