offshore wind energy

The challenge for the offshore wind industry is the transition form a “pioneer industry” to a mass-volume industry. Especially if the ambitious goal of the federal government to install offshore wind turbines with a total capacity of 6.5 gigawatts by 2020 in North and Baltic Sea is considered. For a reliable and economical generation of electricity, a development of the offshore wind turbines for the entire product life cycle is needed as well as the optimization of processes. At present a lot of data is recorded in the individual life cycle phases which contains valuable information for the optimization and further development of offshore wind turbines. Within this paper an approach for the merging information along the life cycle of offshore wind turbines aiming at product improvement will be presented.

Standardisation of industrial solutions is a crucial factor for the competitiveness of whole industry sectors. Especially young and immature industries, like the offshore wind energy sector, may benefit from standardised processes. Several research and development projects address information flow and the planning in this field. The standardisation of the projects results may improve the performance of the whole supply chain. However, the transfer of research and development results to standardisation processes is a challenging task. Thus, this paper introduces a procedure model for the identification and evaluation of research and development results for standardisation.

The relevance of wind energy for the German energy supply increases steadily. This development is driven by the German withdrawal from nuclear energy as well as the ambitious climate policy goals. Furthermore, the fossil energy resources are limited. The logistic network which is needed to create an offshore-wind park is affected by dynamic disturbances like weather conditions as well as other influences. They have an impact on the material-pull which is initiated by the offshore construction site. Already scheduled processes cannot be proceeded which necessitates rescheduling of material flow process-plans. Sometimes material is also pushed back into the network.

The assembly and usage of offshore wind energy plants will increase during the next years. The German government updated the Renewable Energies Act in 2009 which pushes the offshore development ahead. One German offshore wind energy park has been assembled and put into operation so far. Transport, construction and assembly underlie strong influences like weather conditions on sea as well as material availability. The presented article shows these influences and a concept in which adaptive planning and control strategies are used to keep the overall process under control.