Can Sensing Technology Improve Cable Monitoring?

The offshore renewables industry is painfully aware of the status of the power cable as an essential but weakest link in the chain of generation. Cables represent about 10% of the capital cost of a wind farm but 80% of the insurance claims. This imbalance is precarious and represents a real threat to achieving an economic net zero. Fibre-optic sensing has proven its worth over the last decade in protecting the cable from over-temperature events, and distributed temperature sensing (DTS) is now very much essential kit. Industry advances in the deeper analysis of DTS and benefits from the adoption of sister technology – distributed acoustic sensing – are bringing some huge advances in understanding cable condition. This article explores the wealth of information that these new techniques can produce and highlights how previous barriers to adoption are being overcome.