Risk based maintenance for offshore wind structures

Offshore wind is increasingly becoming the driver for Britain's wind power. Statistics released by the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) this year confirm that the UK is consolidating its position as the world leader in the offshore wind sector, with 2.95 GW installed, or 59% of the EU total of the installed 5GW, compared to 921MW for Denmark, 249MW for the Netherlands and 380MW for Belgium. The emerging offshore wind sector is however unlike the Oil & Gas industry in that structures are unmanned, fabricated in much larger volumes and the commercial reality is that the sector has to proactively take measures to further reduce CAPEX and OPEX. Support structures need to be structurally optimised and to avail of contemporary and emerging methodologies in life-cycle structural integrity design and assessment. This paper focuses on methodologies to optimise life-cycle costs using probabilistic risk based design, inspection and maintenance approaches for offshore wind support structures.