R&D highlights edition 2019

PROJECTS Delta infrastructure 42 The Rhyl Flats wind farmwhere Innogy uses the Meteo Dashboard The Meteo Dashboard, a decision support tool to reduce O&M costs REDUCING COSTS INWIND FARMS: METEO DASHBOARD H ard winds, strong currents or high waves: maintenance vessels for offshore wind farms often have to stay in port or return to shore when bad weather suddenly blows in. The resulting costs for the dozens of offshore wind farms in the North Sea are high: operations and maintenance costs account for almost one third of the kWh price of offshore wind farms. To reduce those costs, Deltares, together withMARIN, TNO, The Carbon Trust and Innogy, is developing a decision-support system: the Meteo Dashboard. The Meteo Dashboard is an integrated software system that collects, stores, computes and presents measured and forecasted meteo- and hydrodynamic data for decision-making about maintenance activities in offshore wind farms. The backbone of the system consists of a series of high-resolution forecasting models based onDeltares’ D-FLOWand SWAN software to forecast water levels, currents and wave conditions two days in advance. By using high-resolution bathymetric data as input, thesemodels can provide forecasts on a per turbine level. To account for the inherent uncertainty remaining in these forecasts, several error modelling techniques are used to correct the forecasts and provide uncertainty estimates, such as Artificial Neural Networks, Copulas, Stochastic Interpolation, ARMAmodels, and Linear Regression. The techniques are trained using historical or real-time measurement data available in the system. In addition to forecasting the wave conditions, which determine whether or not technical staff can transfer between the maintenance vessels and turbines, recent improvements to the system focus on also forecasting motion sickness while vessels are in transit to the turbines given the fact that motion sickness can also significantly impact the ability of technical staff to transfer to turbines. The Meteo Dashboard has a web-based interface that operators of wind farms can use to access this information and assess the impact on their operations based on a number of criteria such as themaximumpermissible wave height, or themaintenance vessel used. By using this information in their scheduling process, they can make better decisions about whether to go to sea and which turbines they can work on. In this project, Meteo Dashboard was set up specifically for the Irish Sea. Three Innogy wind farms are located here: Rhyl flats, North Hoyle and Gwynt y Môr. The last of the three only went fully operational in June 2015. The Meteo Dashboard can be applied to other offshore wind farms with relatively little effort. Contact: Jan-Joost Schouten, Janjoost.Schouten@deltares.nl , t +31 (0)6 4691 1168 Daniel Twigt, Daniel.Twigt@deltares.nl , t +31 (0)6 1031 7527 Further reading : https://www.deltares.nl/nl/projecten/dashboard-helpt- windparkbeheerders-kiezen-uitvaren-niet/ Better metocean forecasts and decision-support tools can reduce the cost of operations and maintenance on offshore wind farms. The Meteo Dashboard is an integrated software system that helps to make that possible by collecting, storing, computing and presentingmeasured and forecasted meteo- and hydrodynamic data, vessel motions and impact onmotion sickness for decision-making about maintenance activities in offshore wind farms. Vessel-to-turbine transfer for operations and maintenance