Metocean Risk Ops will soon be expanded to support decommissioning of offshore wind farms.

DHI developer Pietro Danilo Tomaselli said that decision-making for offshore operations relies on the accurate assessment of conditions at sea, traditionally using bulk metocean parameters. However, this approach can often lead to unreliable workability assessments as it doesn’t directly account for actual decision drivers. This means operational cost inefficiencies for the offshore industry and physical hazards for the offshore operators.

“Using Metocean Risk Ops, one can create more efficient and reliable workability assessments,” Tomaselli said. “As a cloud-based application that integrates world-class metocean data with practical risk measures derived from vessel motions, Metocean Risk Ops is the ideal tool for weather window predictions in operational scenarios and seasonal downtime analyses at design stage. Plus, anyone can simulate the entire operation — vessel navigation included — as no modeling expertise is needed.”

Metocean Risk Ops extracts and imports metocean hindcast/forecast data. Output includes visual results for work planning and sharing with others.

The app can update workability assessments as weather forecasts change — eliminating guesswork. Another feature is its ability to monitor workability conditions along a user-defined vessel route using its computational engine.

Metocean Risk Ops can also devise long-term seasonal plans based on metocean hindcast. Users can create accurate downtime analyses backed by MetOcean Data Portal offering 40 years of validated wind, wave, water level and current data.

Metocean Risk Ops was recently tested during the towing of the TetraSpar floating wind turbine foundation from Grenå, Denmark to the Marine Energy Test Centre off the coast of Stavanger, Norway. The towing was a part of the TetraSpar Demonstration Project involving Stiesdal Offshore Technologies, Shell, RWE and TEPCO Renewable Power.

“We were very happy to see that MRO successfully predicted the weather windows during which all planned tasks were safely executed,” Tomaselli said.

News item from DHI

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“The combination with Mortenson Energy Services creates a full suite of services to meet customers’ growing maintenance and repair needs while attracting and retaining the highest quality talent in the wind industry as the leader in the market,” said Zack Dorfman, Pearce Renewables’ Senior Vice President of Wind. “The team at Mortenson Energy Services shares our steadfast commitment to safety, integrity, customer responsiveness, and quality, making them an ideal addition to our organization.”

Mortenson Energy Services provides renewable energy repair and maintenance services and has teams experienced in corrective maintenance, blade repair and major and mid-level component exchange, as well as troubleshooting, commissioning, and other technical operations.

Pearce entered renewable energy a year ago with acquisitions of World Wind & Solar and MaxGen Energy Services. Soon after, the services team from Suzlon North America joined to bring unique capabilities in engineering, spare parts and technical wind services. Pearce Renewables acquired A & A Wind Pros to add wind turbine cleaning and yaw puck services. With the addition of Mortenson Energy Services, Pearce Renewables has over 750 technicians throughout the country and is adding weekly to meet growing demand.

“Mortenson Energy Services has been a successful and growing business since it was created in 2014 to supplement our core wind EPC operations,” said Tim Maag, VP and general manager at Mortenson. “The combination with Pearce will provide tremendous opportunities for team members and ensure a continued strong future for this business and the quality services it provides to customers.”

News item from Pearce Renewables

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Ardexa has a simplified toolkit to enable granular access management and full portfolio oversight, including event audit logs. The new Ardexa Remote solution requires an inexpensive edge computer at the plant, significantly reducing hardware costs. And security has been enhanced.

Ardexa Remote relies on a Public Key Infrastructure (digital certificates, authentication, encryption) and enables two connection methods, tunnel and VPN:

• Ardexa Tunnel allows highly secure access to a specified machine and reduces the risk of malware.

• Ardexa VPN allows access to the entire machine network. This broader access method, while very efficient, should only be used when simultaneous connections to multiple machines in a single network are required.

Additional security benefits are gained by not allowing open ports and ensuring connections to the tunnel are closed automatically when the session is finished.

Granular access control to networks and plants, down to the machine level, can be set using the Ardexa cloud platform. Remote access can be immediately revoked by the account administrator, as required and all activities are stored in an immutable security log, enabling forensic analysis of all events. This is useful following any suspected intrusions into a plant network.

“Ardexa Remote makes remote access much more secure than traditional methods,” said George Cora, CEO of Ardexa. “Once implemented, the edge computer running Ardexa Remote can be rapidly and remotely upgraded to allow data capture and bi-directional control with little effort.”

News item from Ardexa

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