Subsea cable tracking – EMEC is the end-user
The UK’s National Oceanography Centre is leading a project to increase the operational efficiency of the generation of offshore renewable energy by tackling submarine cable failure management.
The project Submarine High-fidelity Active-monitoring of Renewable Energy Cables (SHARC) has received national funding from the Sustainable Innovation Fund.
Documented cable failures across UK sites alone led to a total loss of £227 million between 2014 and 2017, demonstrating the value of technologies to strengthen cable failure-management strategies.
The SHARC project will develop techniques for real-time monitoring of the condition of cables, taking into account the combined impact of various marine environmental and intrinsic effects of cable heating.
This will result in early detection or better prediction of possible cable risks of their potential failures, enabling timely intervention and reducing downtime, according to NOC.
The NOC project is led by a team of experts from the fields of marine geoscience, distributed fibre optics architecture and instrumentation of the next century, ocean technology and engineering, machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithm design, and dynamic and static cable rating exploitation and modelling.
The project's end-user and main stakeholder is the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC).