Reliability-Cost Analysis of Subsea Transmission Cables (with BVG) [£10,000]

The underpinning work focusses on offshore wind, concentrating on the field of subsea transmission links to offshore wind farms. The outcomes will include a database of reliability figures for current offshore wind farms as well as a tool to determine the reliability of prospective cables over their lifetime. This is a new capability unlocked by the research, which is needed because of the lack of any published data and models in this area. The IAA will build on the outcomes of the EPSRC research and look to build new capability in BVG to assess the reliability and quantify the risk of offshore transmission assets (OFTOs) by operationalizing the research as a desktop tool.
BVG Associates will benefit from the expansion of this work which will be developed into a tool which can be used by academia and industry in order to determine the failures that will be experienced. As such the respective costs can also be calculated, as BVGs consultancy business would utilize this when performing due diligence for investors.
BVG Associates are an engineering consultancy with a focus on the sustainable energy sector. They are involved in a range of activities from site assessment and owners engineer to due diligence on asset purchases and through life management particularly for wind assets. Their activities on Levelised cost of energy (LCoE) also relate to the longer term energy cost trajectory of wind.
Recently their OFTO (offshore transmission owner) work has focused on advisory work on acquisition of OFTO assets from project developers to strategic owners (hedge funds, pension pots etc). There is a need for this service to be more grounded in operational experience (of which there is little information in the public domain). One key challenge is the relative lack of operational data on live OFTOs, to condition risk in an asset purchase and to adequately size any contingency budget. We propose that this capability should be provided by Strathclyde who have extracted operational metrics from a diverse range of sources (including marine bulletins and other published sources). Such a new model would provide greater validity than the standard business as usual approach of using Cigre report metrics – representing assets working in completely different operating regimes (large inter-country cables at very high burial depths).