Proserv to monitor cables on Equinor’s Hywind Scotland floating wind farm

Global controls technology leader Proserv will supply its pioneering holistic cable monitoring system (CMS), ECG, to Norwegian energy company Equinor’s Hywind Scotland, the company said.

In 2017, Hywind Scotland became the world’s first commercial floating offshore wind farm, located off the coast of Peterhead, Aberdeenshire in north-east Scotland.

Proserv’s CMS will help analyse the condition and integrity of export and inter-array cables across the wind farm utilising the fibre optic cores within the cables, the company said in a statement. The demonstration, focused on ECG’s data analytics abilities, is scheduled to extend until April 2024 with installation and commissioning set to take place in the third quarter of this year.

“We are most grateful to Equinor for enabling us to supply our ECG cable monitoring solution to the Hywind Scotland wind farm and to display the potential and power of this technology, including its data analytics capabilities,” Paul Cook, Business Development Director – Renewables at Proserv, said in a statement.

“Owners and operators urgently need a cohesive O&M strategy around their cable assets and with its scrutiny of terminations, alongside its unique predictive insights, ECG offers unrivalled visibility of this key part of an offshore wind farm’s infrastructure,” Cook said.

With ECG, companies can change their traditional monitoring methods, adopting comprehensive visibility across cable assets as an integrated, scalable and multi-faceted single package.

The technology has been initiated and driven by Proserv with support from its consortium partners Synaptec, a power system monitoring expert, and BPP Cable Solutions, specialists in subsea power cable engineering and management. The Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult (OREC) has also given its support to the group during the development of the solution.

The CMS not only employs distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) but engages Synaptec’s unique distributed electromechanical sensors (DES), via its passive electrical and mechanical sensor systems, Proserv said.

The hardware will be complemented by the intuitive human-machine interface, utilising Proserv’s TIACS software suite, it said.

Critically, Proserv’s ECG can monitor the condition and performance of cable terminations, an aspect that needs further development in the offshore wind sector since cable terminations are well-known for being a serious failure point.

During ECG’s demonstration on Hywind Scotland, BPP Cable Solutions will provide advanced real-time data processing and predictive analytics modelling, representing a major shift from traditional reactive cable performance monitoring approaches, whereby a cable fault or failure is analysed from stored data after an event takes place, Proserv said.