By Emma Clarke, UK correspondent

Increasing offshore activity and a proliferation of onshore wind farms is threatening to tilt the industry’s accident incidence curve precariously.

In lieu of industry-wide health and safety guidelines, subcontractors are often subject to overlapping health and safety training procedures - at a significant cost and time investment for all concerned. Consequently, there is a growing need for universal templates for training procedures.

Developing universal standards for areas such as health and safety and offshore access systems would significantly minimise costs, risks and uncertainty for manufacturers, developers, owners as well as financiers of offshore wind farms.

Health and safety standards are top of the list of priorities. The concern is that a lack of cohesion between levels of health and safety requirements across different projects and countries creates confusion within the industry.

“Even though we have tried to standardise our rules, there are still many differences between sites,” says Flemming Ougaard, senior vice president for service at Vestas Offshore. “It makes life difficult if staff have a different set of rules to adhere for each work site.”

Standards for training would also ensure greater freedom of movement of staff servicing different projects. At present, says Ougaard, the staff Vestas use via third party service providers must receive new training each time they change client or project.

Speaking the same language

Issues concerning communications systems could also be better tackled if the industry sits down together to find common solutions, he adds. “This will not make any difference to how we compete; instead it will ensure a safer and more professional way to do business.”

Standardisation could also improve costs and efficiency within the industry. Currently manufacturers have to approach each project afresh, in some cases re-thinking designs and processes to suit the requirements of the project and its national market.

“By simplifying a few key items, it could speed up the procurement process - which, at the moment is lengthy,” says Joe Phillips, offshore engineer at renewable energy consultancy, Garrad Hassan & Partners.

Turbine manufacturers would also like to see standards developed for the design of service platforms and boat landings. This could prompt manufacturers to focus innovation on areas such as generator and blade design, says Joe Corbett, head of technical services at renewable energy company, Mainstream Renewable Power. “This is where manufacturers can really add value.”

That said, Phillips argues that innovations are still emerging in some aspects of O&M such as access design, which standardisation could stifle if imposed too soon. “Some players within the industry might find rigorous assessment of systems on a project-by-project basis frustrating. But this is necessary to allow innovation and the best approaches to come forward naturally,” he says. 

Setting boundaries

For this reason, Phillips would prefer O&M standards to be limited to administrative areas such as training, health and safety and communications rather than focus on strategic areas such as access design.

An alternative could be to create guidelines for these strategic aspects, rather than strict criteria through standards. “Guidelines are a more useful tool to allow the stakeholder to make considered judgments,” he says.

Kaj Lindvig, chief sales officer of installation vessel supplier A2SEA adds that standardisation of access design could also be problematic due to variances in marine conditions at different sites.

“On the west coast of the UK you need platforms at least 15 metres above sea level, but in the Baltic sea they only need to be 3.5 metres above the sea,” he says.  

Currently, the impetus for O&M standards comes predominantly from turbine manufacturers. REpower Systems recently called for a forum that would bring together manufacturers and operating companies to discuss possible standards in HSE and offshore access systems.

Axel Birk, senior vice president for global service at REpower has suggested that an organization such as the Wind Energy Agency Bremerhaven/Bremen (WAB) in Germany is best placed to organise such a forum.  Likewise, the Crown Estate in UK could also be behind such an effort.

A spokesperson at Crown Estate confirmed that standards for Health and Safety, training and for O&M is an area that it is keen to develop as the industry grows.

Universal code?

Given the global nature of the wind industry, standards should intuitively be cross-border. An international standard developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is one possibility for countries looking to harmonize national safety standards, says Sandy Butterfield, CEO of Boulder Wind Power in the USA and chairman of the TC88 committee for wind turbines.

But his request to draft an international labour safety standard was declined by the committee, which concluded it would not be possible to reach consensus since safety standards were dominated by national standards.

To some extent, the offshore wind industry could also adopt existing standards used by the oil and gas sector. An ongoing study by the EU-funded POWER Cluster found that while standards for training, safety, design, maintenance, inspection are all industry-wide issues, there are still lot of standards available under ISO and API which could be adopted by the offshore wind industry.

Onlookers are confident that the impetus for collaboration around such issues will increase. Corbett points to the work being carried out by The Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator, which he says “speaks of a willingness within the industry to cooperate”. This initiative brings together five international energy companies to focus on areas such as developing foundation and installation techniques as well as facilitating access to offshore turbines for maintenance.  This sort of scheme must now be extended to bring in the wider industry including manufacturers, says Corbett.

As Ougaard at Vestas Offshore notes: “It is necessary that we sit down together as an industry and agree on some kind of standard, otherwise confusion will dominate as growth continues”.

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