10/April/2019                      

César Yanes, Head of Innovation at Iberdrola Renovables, gave a conference about how ROMEO European Project will contribute to offshore O&M cost reduction

ROMEO Project was presented last 4th of April in Bilbao at WindEurope 2019, the most important event in Europe for the wind industry, with an average of 8,000 professionals attending from all over the world and over 400 exhibitors from 50 countries.

It was a good chance for European wind industry most relevant stakeholders to learn about ROMEO, an initiative backed by the EU through its H2020 programme which is developing advanced technological solutions that enable the operation and maintenance costs of offshore wind power farms to be reduced.

The presentation, carried out by César Yanes, Head of Innovation at Iberdrola Renovables, was part of the conference “Digitalisation: creating value in O&M”, which included participants like Nasly Vanesa Penilla-Puerta, Program Manager for Digitalization in PLM Services at Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy; Alfonso Faubel, President at Europe, Sentient Science;; Nikolay Dimitrov, Senior Scientist at DTU Wind Energy and Idoia Iceta, Energy CEO at NEM Solutions.

Yanes explained how the project’s progress in digitalisation, including advanced analytics, is to be used in operation and maintenance of wind farms.

First of all, Yanes introduced ROMEO and talked about its objectives to reach greater reliability, less repairs and more safety. He explained how the project aims to increase wind farm reliability and decrease the number of failures leading to downtime, increase the life time of key turbine components, reduce O&M costs through the reduction of the resources required for annual inspections of the turbine and reduce O&M costs associated to foundation through reduction in jacket substructures inspections.

He also detailed the project achievements to date, such as new monitoring techniques for thestudy of degradation and failure symptoms and how to capture and measure them at test bench scale for testing and improvement purposes; physical models of main components under development, support structures low cost monitoring technologies, digitalization and data integration and the  integration of processing elements and protocols; and finally the O&M platform set up.