World Forum Offshore Wind (WFO) published its White Paper Mooring Systems for Floating Offshore Wind: Integrity Management Concepts, Risks & Mitigation.
Whilst there is therefore no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to mooring systems for floating offshore wind, a robust integrity management philosophy and associated process, covering all stages of the mooring life cycle and developed in detail during the initial design phase, will be essential for securing finance and insurance coverage across all projects.
Redundancy is an important issue when considering continuous energy production. The provision of alternative load paths through additional lines (n+1 concept) is generally considered the preferred option. However, increasing the capacity or size of equipment, effective sparing strategies, employing load reduction devices and utilising digital twins to facilitate predictive maintenance may also be suitable approaches to improving availability.
The Committee identified that an independent, anonymised reporting system which benefits all stakeholders deserves further investigation and may therefore form part of its future work. Indeed, while common failure modes and degradation mechanisms are well understood from offshore oil and gas experience, there is limited transferability with respect to floating offshore wind. New threats are either unknown or less well-understood and consequently not easily prevented by existing integrity management practices. All integrity management data (and not just failures) should be made available so that the whole industry can learn quickly together. Intellectual property and commercial contractual constraints also need to be relaxed or modified to facilitate data sharing.