New concept for offshore wind turbine maintenance could open ‘virtual factory’ at sea — here’s how it works

Offshore wind turbines could provide a huge amount of the clean, renewable energy that we need to be able to leave behind dirty, polluting energy sources like gas and oil. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, wind turbines installed in the open ocean are pretty difficult to maintain.

Now, a new innovation could make that maintenance a lot more doable, Interesting Engineering reported.

Danish naval engineering firm Knud E Hansen has created a new concept called “Jack-up on Jack-up,” which it described as a “virtual factory” around the turbine blades, allowing technicians to work continuously regardless of weather conditions.

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The “Jack-up on Jack-up” concept includes a telescopic weather cover that creates a controlled environment, making life much easier for the technicians and allowing for a much more regular maintenance schedule. While currently, technicians are forced to remove damaged blades and bring them back to shore for repair, the new concept would allow them to fix the blades onsite.

Knud E Hansen said that the concept is large enough to handle even the biggest wind turbines in the world and even strong enough to allow technicians to replace a nacelle — the cover housing that houses all of the generating components in a wind turbine — weighing up to 1,000 tons.

This new technological advancement comes at a crucial time when the offshore wind industry in the United States needs all the help it can get. Although there are many offshore wind projects in the works, such as one in California that could power up to 25 million homes, another large-scale wind farm off the coast of Virginia, and more, the industry is also facing challenges from political opponents and a portion of the public that has been fed misinformation by the competing dirty energy industries.

Florida, for example, recently advanced a bill banning offshore wind turbines despite there not being any under development in the state.

While this new technological advancement allowing for easier turbine maintenance will not directly affect Florida’s ban, it does show how wind energy technology is getting better and better, while the misinformation that is being used to delay progress is only getting more stale.

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