Mike Hines, Indeximate NED for North America Strategic Growth, discusses the outlook for cable monitoring in North America, after a challenging 12 months in offshore wind, what is on the horizon?
The long-term view
While recent policy developments have created near-term challenges for offshore wind in the United States, the broader global trend towards renewable energy continues to underpin demand for submarine power cable infrastructure.
Global offshore wind capacity has grown from 12 GW in 2015 to 74 GW by 2023, driven by developments from Europe to Asia. Canada’s Maritime provinces are part of this global trend, where excellent wind profiles exist along the northeast coastline and are ideal for expansion of offshore wind power.
This global momentum creates a powerful foundation for North American submarine power cable infrastructure, extending far beyond any single policy cycle.
The vulnerability of submarine cable
Submarine power cables are the most vulnerable component of offshore wind systems. Lloyd Warwick, a leading loss adjuster, estimates that 83% of offshore wind related financial losses and insurance claims are due to power cable failures. Array cable failures lead to an average downtime of 40 days and losses of $1.2M-$12M; export cable failures take 60 days to repair and losses range between $10M-$30M. For every 62 miles (100km) of export cable wind farms have a 24% chance of failure in any given year.
Crucially, failures occur across all submarine power cable applications, and North America’s extensive submarine power cable infrastructure would benefit from advanced monitoring solutions. All cable types are vulnerable, island and costal connections, cross-border and regional interconnectors, industrial infrastructure from cables connecting to offshore platforms and those connecting naval bases and ports.
The critical role of fiber sensing
Submarine power cables are commonly manufactured to include optical fiber, allowing for two monitoring technologies: Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) and Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS). These are essential systems for any submarine power cable deployment.
DTS technology monitors temperature variations along the entire cable length to provide early warning of thermal changes that indicate electrical issues, insulation degradation, load imbalances, and depth-of-burial issues that could lead to premature failure.
DAS technology detects in-situ cable and environmental vibrations and acoustic signatures that indicate cable movement, external interference from anchoring and/or fishing activities and structural stresses that could lead to mechanical failure.
Measuring health
Uniquely, Indeximate transforms fiber sensing into spectacular health monitoring systems, analyzing petabytes of data from built-in cable fibers and delivering real-time insight with zero operational disruption. Indeximate’s
Scattersphere® technology goes beyond providing simple alarms to offer unprecedented intelligence on cable health and user-friendly insights that directly benefit cable operators and maintainers.
Beyond traditional DAS and DTS raw data feeds, Indeximate measures long-duration impacts that contribute to cable vibration, abrasion and fatigue. This, crucially, opens a time window of months to years for predictive maintenance, thus avoiding many of the pitfalls associated with cable failures. Indeximate monitoring cable degradation is tracked continuously at every point by identifying failure mechanisms. These include cable abrasion caused by dragging across rocks (cable skipping), vibration, and strains that lead to fatigue. The Scattersphere process enables prediction of remaining life and provides a forensic capability that has not been possible until now.
Creating value
Capturing, identifying and analyzing these failure modes enables a fundamental shift from reactive to predictive maintenance. Planning ahead for operations by securing and replacing components before they fail lowers costs. Data allows operating parameters to adjust to extend cable life to and avoid unexpected failure that leads to expensive emergency repairs.
Investment in cable health monitoring is imperative when compared to the cost of failure. Submarine power cable projects involve capital expenditure in the billions of dollars, while reactive repairs typically cost between $10M to $30M on average with revenue losses from outages escalating rapidly. Against these risks, continuous asset protection through remote monitoring is a fraction of the cost of failure.
A continental challenge
Submarine power cables are a critical infrastructure in North America. Cables carry power between countries, regions and critical infrastructure all across the continent, representing billions of dollars in critical assets. Much of this aging infrastructure serves essential functions, from national defenses to regional power grid stability. Abrasion from currents and debris, vibration-induced fatigue, external damage from maritime activities and environmental stresses all threaten these cables.
Indeximate’s predictive monitoring identifies degradation to enable preventative maintenance and avoid high-cost disruption from catastrophic failures. For North American infrastructure operators, the message is clear: submarine power cables are both critical assets and significant risks. Whether supporting offshore wind, connecting islands, or enabling grid interconnections, these cables require intelligent monitoring to maximize their value and minimize failure risks.
Building resilience
America needs robust submarine power cable infrastructure. The economic and technological arguments for protecting it through intelligent monitoring are compelling.
Indeximate’s sole mission is preventing failure of submarine power cables. We are 100% dedicated to this challenge. We have shown our value through real-world deployments, including our work with MeyGen to protect its tidal turbine assets.
Building on established principles and technologies, we have innovated advanced data science algorithms that extract meaningful insights from this sensor data, to provide operators actionable intelligence about cable health and remaining life.
In an era of uncertainty, investing in the health and longevity of critical infrastructure represents both prudent risk management and preparation, for an inevitably more electrified renewable-powered future.
Be in the lead by learning about this game-changing approach to management of critically important submarine power cable assets by visiting www.indeximate.com.
