Goals

The technical objectives of ARIA2 are the development and respective impact assessment of an agreed number of customised information services based in Earth Observation (EO) data, to support decision making processes by the wind energy sector in the design and operations planning of offshore infrastructures in the Atlantic Region.

One crucial goal is to develop an integrated offshore infrastructure planning and operations dashboard, that can provide a single access point to the different EO services, to be developed with advanced data visualisation and download capabilities. Driven by this innovative platform, the user will be able to trigger service runs, access easily all service outputs, compare different site locations, configurations and maintenance scenarios and get support from a specialised team for each one of these services.

The EO based services will cover different areas of wind farm design and operations, from wind resource and wake effect assessment to the definition of maintenance operations weather windows, detected by expert teams coming from different partners.

The dashboard will integrate these new EO based services with wind industry sector standard metricsfor energy production,like Annual Energy Production (AEP) and Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE), addressing the full information value chain, to provide meaningful and familiar information to infrastructure managers and other interested stakeholders.

Another project goal is the comprehensive assessment of the rain erosionof wind turbine blades from the operation and maintenance perspective of a wind farm operator. The work will include an estimation of the rain erosion at the site, a prediction of the need for repair or protect systems to extend the turbine lifetime and finally a climate prediction to enable inspection and repair of the wind turbines.

This work will be the first of its kind and is a prototype level data for initial evaluation by end users, namely, wind farm owners, operators and planners.