Evaluating resource sharing for offshore wind farm maintenance: The case of jack-up vessels

Highlights: • Three policies are studied for the deployment of jack-up vessels for offshore wind farm maintenance. • Collaboratively purchasing and sharing a jack-up vessel outperforms individually leasing it. • Adding harbour facility sharing among operators only leads to slightly further cost reductions. • Operators should not focus on high jack-up utilisation as this results in unnecessarily high costs. • Yearly cost and the best coalition size are particularly sensitive to the replacement time and failure rate of the gearbox. -- Abstract: Offshore wind energy is recognised globally as a viable alternative to finite energy sources. However, large cost reductions are still needed, particularly in the Operations & Maintenance (O&M) phase, which currently accounts for about 30% of the cost of offshore wind. For large component replacements, a jack-up vessel is often leased from the spot market, resulting in high costs and low utilisation. These costs can be lowered when multiple wind farm service providers would share the resources needed to employ jack-up vessels. In this paper, we analyse two types of resource sharing, as an alternative to each service provider leasing its own vessel: (i) vessel purchasing and sharing and (ii) the combined use of vessel and harbour sharing. We design a simulation model and include stochastic processes such as weather patterns and component failures. Results show that cost benefits up to 45% can be achieved compared to a leasing policy, depending on the number of wind farm service providers involved and on the geographical distance between offshore wind farms. Moreover, it is shown that the jack-up vessel should not be fully utilised to minimise costs. The performance benefits of harbour sharing in addition to vessel sharing are generally small, but become more significant if the network faces considerable congestion. Results are illustrated using a case study based on a setting in the Western North Sea.