Minimization of transportation and installation time for offshore wind turbines

The most challenging aspect of introducing an offshore wind energy facility is high cost of capital for transportation and installation of wind turbines. The cost associated with transportation and installation depends on the required time to complete these processes and the time requirement can be minimized by optimum selection of many variables of transportation and installation operations such as onshore preassembly of turbines, rated power output of each turbine and number of turbines in the wind farm. Impact of these decision variables on total time requirement of transportation and installation is investigated in this paper, and a time estimation model for wind turbine installation and transportation is developed. Effect of wind farm and vessel parameters on time requirement is studied. Also a numerical study is performed to illustrate the model. The results show that total time requirement is significantly impacted by turbine size and pre-assembly method.