The project idea originated from the understanding that it is crucial to have the knowledge and tools to detect and mitigate failures in cables and foundations of offshore wind farms as this is the key to large cost reductions and to economically viable wind production as an energy source.
Last month Marlinks had the pleasure to onboard Andrew Lloyd, our new UK Business Development Manager, who comes with a vast experience in the power cable installation, repair and maintenance sector having worked for Global Marine for over 20 years.
As the need for renewable energy sources increases, so do damage claims of offshore wind farms. Facing the brunt such claims, insurance companies are turning to submarine cable monitoring. Over 80% of insurance claims were due to cable damage. Read more about this topic via our latest blog article.
Now that we have officially entered the year 2023, we are happy yet nostalgic to look back at the fantastic past year. Because yes, 2022 was an exceptionally important year for Marlinks. The Virya Energy investment opened many additional doors for us. This involved certain objectives to be achieved, but we were ready with the entire team to bring these objectives to a successful outcome. That is precisely why 2022 was a year of growing together.
Our UK brand ambassador has seen the offshore wind market evolve from its early stages and left a considerable mark on the whole industry. However, to all great stories come an end, and every protagonist deserves some rest time as well.
We are extremely proud that Marlinks won the Blue Innovation Wave award for Cable Protecion System (CPS) monitoring. The aim with this innovation is to closely monitor different CPS and submarine power cables in offshore wind farms by measuring acoustic vibrations along the cables through Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS).
While in Europe we are encountering severe drought issues, in the East Asian region the opposite is happening, namely typhoon season. Luckily it has been a rather calm typhoon year, but did you know that typhoons can technically cause waves as high as ten to twenty meters? This is sufficient to sink a vessel on sea. The high wind intensity and rainfall during a typhoon make it very difficult to perform any maintenance or construction work offshore.
Within the APAC region Taiwan is a frontrunner in view of the transition towards renewable energy, having released in 2022 its “pathway to net zero emissions by 2050”. This pathway includes Taiwan plans on introducing 1.5GW of offshore wind capacity per year between 2026 and 2035. Whilst speaking, the auctions (also called round 3 auctions) for these capacities are ongoing. Floating wind will make its entry as well, seen the Bureau of Energy has promoted developers to submit projects including floating technology for the round 3 auctions.
Our goal at Marlinks is to turn data into actionable insights. In a nutshell, this means as a starting point we verify and enhance the quality of the raw data and afterwards we process the data to provide actionable insights to the client. Today we talk with our IT engineer Sander Van De Moortel, who’s working daily on developing and improving our software.
Andy knows the offshore wind submarine power cable transmission market inside out, having seen first hand how the industry moved from oil & gas to renewable energies and combined with the telecom submarine cable industry has defined the current offshore wind cable industry standards. It was long overdue that we needed to share with our network a droplet of his insights.
Our R&D lead Manly Callewaert won the conference poster award at the WindEurope event. In collaboration with Elia, we succeeded in challenging the industry standard and improving the time accuracy on how to calculate the core conductor temperature within subsea cables for the offshore wind industry.
