Maximising availability is paramount for profitable wind farm operation.
And if you’re a wind farm operator or engineer, you will want to know exactly when and where electrical faults are developing, so engineering maintenance can be planned in advance of failure occurring.
Knowing the existence of developing faults enables a proactive rather than reactive response, which is easier and more cost effective to manage, maximising availability and profitability of the asset and preventing downtime.
UK wind farm cable failure
In the UK offshore windfarms alone account for over 2,100km of inter-array cables, transporting over 8GW of generation. So far more than 50 inter-array cable failures have been recorded for fully commissioned sites. And as the sector continues to expand - 40GW of offshore wind is the target by 2030 – the number of failures will only increase.
How to maximise availability of wind farms? Array cable monitoring
Across industry applications, 90% of faults in power cables are phase to earth faults. Bender has capability and expertise in cable monitoring technology, and we now offer this solution for use in wind farm inter-array cables (onshore or offshore) to maximise availability for wind farm operators.
Proven solutions for cable monitoring
The UK rail industry utilises Bender technology to monitor signal power systems. The signalling power network is formed of a Principal Supply Point (equivalent to the collector station of a wind farm) where a DNO supply is transformed to 650V. The network is split into feeders (strings) which feeds Functional Supply Points (FSPs, or in this case, turbines) from which local supplies are taken to power signalling equipment. A typical network with a single transformer might have 6 feeders, each with 12 FSPs covering 10s of kilometres of track.
If the signalling supply drops, trains are unable to run, resulting in delays for passengers and penalties for operators. Bender rail signal power technology is installed at the principal supply point, and also at the functional supply points to continuously monitor the system for faults, giving advanced warning of which sections of cables are developing faults, so that they can be repaired before failure occurs.
Proposal for wind farm inter-array cable monitoring
We’ve traditionally been limited to medium voltage applications, up to ~15kV, but have now increased our capability to higher voltages. This means Bender can now offer a similar solution for inter-array cables.
We need your help to deploy it…
Equipment will be installed at the collector station (where strings of cables come together), and on turbines around the wind farm to split the cables up into sections.