Identification and evaluation of innovation opportunities in the operations & maintenance segment of the offshore wind industry

Abstract

The technological advances have and are continuing to develop at an accelerating pace. One may argue that the speed has reached a limit that companies struggle to follow, something that may endanger their business model. The technological breakthroughs are announced so frequently, that a new need has emerged: a method for companies to identify how the rapid technological developments can benefit their business. A model that assesses the technologies against their business segments and facilitates the identification of opportunities is thus necessary. This research undertakes this challenge and applies such a model to the industry. A suitable area to carry out this task is the offshore wind industry. The demand for sustainable power is continuously increasing, and the offshore wind industry has proved to be a highly promising solution when the massive challenge of decarbonizing the energy industry. This industry is strikingly fragmented, with few established procedures, especially within operations & maintenance (O&M). Furthermore, operational costs have to be driven down dramatically in order to prove its viability. The area of O&M is then an appropriate area for applying the model. The aim of this thesis is thus to identify and evaluate technological innovation opportunities in the O&M segment of offshore wind.

The model has five steps: 1) Breakdown of the industry and technology trends 2) application of technology trends to the industry segments, 3) identification of opportunities, 4) presentation and evaluation of opportunities, 5) presentation of the most promising opportunities through a business model canvas (BMC). The industry breakdown and the theory regarding technology trends (chapter 3 and 4) provides the theoretical introduction needed in order to digest the following chapters. Chapter 5 propose 14 innovative opportunities, which is immediately screened. Chapter 6 presents three of the most promising opportunities in the BMC. The offshore wind industry is characterized by harsh conditions and remote areas. This makes some technologies more suitable than others, and will thus be focused on in this research. Technologies that has proved to be particularly promising are MEMS sensors, Fiber Bragg gratings, LiDARs, AUVs, crawlers, drones, digital twins, distributed ledger technology, smart glasses, virtual reality and Big Data. The most promising opportunities that are identified in this research are: A method for monitoring scour with fiber optic sensors, a digital twin for data- and documentation control, and a method for remote maintenance support using smart glasses.