Rapid advances in digitalisation and automation will be needed to drive the next era of cost reduction in the offshore wind industry, or developers could fall foul of ever-narrowing project margins as the sector enters the zero-subsidy era, according to DNV GL.

The “mega trend” of projects upsizing to gigawatt-scale to reach an ever-lower levelised cost of energy (LCOE), would not be enough for future offshore wind auctions where margins “are so tight”, said DNV GL global head of offshore wind Peter Brun, speaking exclusively with Recharge ahead of today’s launch of the DNV GL report, Offshore Wind: The Power to Progress.

“Offshore wind is not an infant technology any more — it is maturing so rapidly. It has passed the juncture where we are not looking into the minutiae, we are looking at truly big scale. That’s the game-changer: offshore wind is about to grow immensely,” he stated.

“But we will have to find new ways to improve the profitability of the future offshore wind farms because much as we have achieved impressive cost reductions through bigger and bigger turbines and so on — and we’ve been very innovative already — there is much more to do.

“We need to ‘cluster’ because the auction prices we are seeing in Europe are extremely aggressive [and] the margins are so tight. But we also need to make a leap in [the use of] digitalisation.”

Developers have “just started on the digitalisation journey”, Brun said, noting “we have high hopes this will lead to even greater efficiencies, bringing improvements to planning, installation and operation in the next era [of offshore wind]”.

In the first instance, future improvements to the hardware — turbines and foundations — will be further streamlined by digitalisation, Brun said.

“There will be further cost reductions of the hardware and much of this will be done by digital twins [where technology can be modelled and virtutally tested on-screen] because the way everything is being developed in a way now where you can test out different engineering options — for specific geotechnical or meteorological conditions, for instance — and get a stable proof-point that way.”

But this digital leverage will be “equally if not more important” in automating future offshore project development and operations, Brun predicted, with robots “supplementing” and later supplanting humans in heavy-lift and underwater work, especially for wind farms located in remote and hazardous environments.

“From construction through to O&M [operations and maintenance] there is a lot to gain from doing this all more digitally, more smartly,” said Brun. “New digital tools including AI [artificial intelligence] will help the industry drive cost reduction and expansion faster.”

The arrival of oil & gas giants into the offshore wind space will bring not only “big capital [but also] big digital innovations”, he added. “This will be one of the biggest drivers. The oil industry is now very keen to enter the power sector through offshore wind and they understand the ‘technology environment’ very well, including digital and automation.

“The ambition is to make offshore wind LCOE the most cost-competitive large-scale power generation technology there is. And part of that is scale. But the other part is efficiency and much of that is down to digitalisation — and increasingly so.”

DNV GL calculates that offshore projects will account for 40% of all wind projects by 2040, as the industry builds capacity to around 600GW, en route to installing 1,500GW by mid-century.

“If you model [the growth of the offshore wind industry] based on the technologies’ progress, then the main message is that on the global scale expansion is going be staggering and will require still more scaling-up of turbines, improvements in construction methodologies in the ports and harbours and so on but will, like everything, be digitally-enhanced, digitally-driven.” 

Wind

Digital drivers will power 'next era' of offshore wind cost cutting