Visualising the complete offshore wind farm

Moreld Apply is a leading supplier of multidisciplinary engineering services and technologies for customers in the energy sector. Its Front End & Green Solutions business area is working with subsea field development and offshore wind farm design as well as topside and onshore decarbonisation and hydrogen solutions.

Much in common with subsea engineering
Subsea fields and offshore wind farms have much in common from a development perspective where many of the same methodologies can be utilised. Moreld Apply takes a building-block approach familiar from subsea development projects, defining the system functions and subsystems for the field/farm to rank and systemise the technical options.

While the main drivers in subsea field developments are reservoir, flow assurance, infrastructure and bathymetry and soil data, the main drivers in wind farm design are wind characteristics, power management as well as the necessary seabed data.

Engineering, visualising, and collating the many elements and operations are something Moreld Apply is good at - defining commercial and technical alternatives from the client perspective – the operator of the full field/farm.

Simplifying complexity
Developing offshore wind farms calls for visualisation of the entire solution, including modelling the offshore wind system, floating or fixed solutions, IAC and export cables and mooring in combination with seabed data, site, routing and landfall topology, and map data for onshore and existing infrastructure.

Bringing transmission cables ashore.

This work is done using software which combines all the elements and allows several different solutions to be constructed in the same model.

Such elements as turbine size (MW), cable capacity (kV) and redundancy to ensure system availability are major drivers for optimising the cost of an offshore wind power system.

Floater solutions with mooring and transmission cables.

Moreld Apply designs and simplifies this complexity and delivers a cost and installation estimate for the whole farm, irrespective of whether fixed or floating technology is used.

Security and savings
Visualising an offshore wind farm in a systematic and structured manner will increase the understanding of the project stakeholders. By considering the wind farm as a complete system can expose advantages and disadvantages of the design and commercial choices being considered.

Establishing the technical and commercial drivers at an early stage in a project, along with defining the external constraints, enhances the quality of the overall solution. That provides a source of security as well as cost and time savings.

This methodological approach to development identifies all the elements in the wind farm and integrate them in a visualisation available to all the parties involved in a web-based solution.

Big potential
Moreld Apply currently delivers early-phase engineering services to the offshore wind industry for both national and international projects.

The company sees a big potential in farm-wide developments for offshore wind power, since several projects are set to be pursued both off Norway and internationally in coming years. These will all need cost-effective solutions of the kind Moreld Apply can deliver.