Accurate estimation of maintenance costs offshore wind farms with ECN software tool

Petten – The Energy research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN) has developed a tool which makes it possible to estimate the maintenance costs of an –offshore- wind farm in the development stage very accurately. Although more suppliers offer software and services in this range, the ECN-software is the only tool that is validated by an independent authority.

With this tool project developers can quickly determine the influence of a lot of different parameters on the maintenance and operation costs of offshore wind farms in advance.  For instance reliability of  the wind turbines, costs of spare parts and (crane) ships, or the limited accessibility caused by wind and wave conditions. The software tool combines the know how of ECN with experience in many (offshore) wind projects in an easy to work with tool .

The tool was validated by the classification office Germanischer Lloyd in September this year.

Luc Rademakers (r) (Head of Group Operations and Condition Monitoring) receives the validation statement from Peter Dahlhoff (m) ( Head of Projects Department, Germanischer Lloyd Industrial Services GmbH en Niels Kruse (l).

According to Germanischer Lloyd the model represents the state of the art in operation and maintenance modeling. This means that it is as accurate in its calculations as possible with the current information; And this in a user-friendly model. Applying the validated model to determine the maintenance costs of offshore wind projects will definitely speed up the project certification.

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For more information:

Frans Stravers, Head of Communications ECN, telephone +31 224 564136 or
e-mail stravers@remove-this-part-ecn.nl.

Luc Rademakers, ECN Windenergy, Manager Operations & Condition Monitoring, telephone +31 224 564943 or email rademakers@remove-this-part-ecn.nl.

 

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