Better decision making for offshore wind power

Opencast supported ORE Catapult, the Crown Estate and offshore wind farm owner/operators on SPARTA, a collaborative project to improve wind turbine operational performance by increasing safety, reliability and availability.

Challenge

Poor quality wind farm data

Wind farms are not all the same: some locations are more cost-efficient than others. Wind turbine designs also vary. Some deliver more power, while others need more maintenance.

The SPARTA – System Performance, Availability and Reliability Trend Analysis – brought together commercial operators with the Crown Estates (which owns the seabed) and the UK government. With concerns over anonymity and confidentiality, all stakeholders wanted the same result: intuitive, secure data that could help them to make wiser investment decisions in the future.

In this increasingly vital sector, which is helping the UK to become more self-sufficient in terms of energy, knowing what equipment and which locations are performing best is always of both commercial and of national interest. This collaborative project was designed to create an interactive analytics tool and platform for collecting this key information.

Response

New easy-to-use data platform

Working in partnership with SPARTA’s technology team, the Opencast team helped to structure the vast amounts of complex data being gathered into a web-enabled, user-friendly platform. We designed and project-managed the creation of the new platform.

Impact

Good data for better decisions

Opencast designed an application for analysing the data. And, using our earlier experience in the banking sector, made sure that confidentiality and security issues were addressed, anonymising all data, except when it was being viewed by authorised users.

"Our response was to structure the vast amounts of complex data being gathered into a web-enabled, user-friendly platform"