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XceCo Case Study:

Full Asset Management – Lynn & Inner Dowsing Wind Farms

Management of two Wind Farms, all contractors, finance, engineering, operations and spares and managing the operating facilities, IT, commercial and all ancillary structures.

The Lynn and Inner Dowsing (“LID”) projects are located 5 km off the east coast of England by the town of Skegness in Lincolnshire. The two projects were in most technical respects merged into one and were constructed, entering full operation in March 2009.

Each project has 27 Siemens 3.6-107 turbines, with a total generating capacity of 97.2 MW and are connected at 33 kV to the Middlemarsh onshore substation to the west of Skegness. The projects are to be operated for a 25-year lifetime.

XceCo Ltd act as agents, managing the whole asset on behalf of the owners

As of March 2016, LID was purchased outright by holding companies wholly-owned by investment funds

Lynn & Inner Dowsing are operated out of the Grimsby Renewables Operations Base. XceCo manage this facility on their behalf, providing its services to all contractors engaged in managing the operations and maintenance and projects at the asset.

Health and safety management

The team worked through many health, safety and environmental issues in operations. Taking a construction high LTI and early life poor lagging indicators, and transforming the business into one which now has had almost 5 years with zero LTI’s and extreme low TRIR.

This was not achieved through management of indicators, through initiative overload, or by loading work onto incident reporters which can have the effect of discouraging reporting.

This was achieved through culture change, by open dialog, by feedback and closing out of actions, by creating a place that was a pleasure to work, and by welcoming and working with new ideas. The team do not follow the logic of chasing lagging indicators, the team look forward, listen, respond and achieve

Foundations & Life Extension

Fatigue assessments completed to allow continued operation of the asset over the original design life by 25%.

GCR/FCR

Design and remedial work completed on the foundations following the discovery that the grouted connection hadn’t performed as designed. Retrofit successfully completed on all 54 foundations to prevent further slippage.

Internal anode protection installed and operating successfully on all the foundations.

Lynn and Inner Dowsing were the first wind farms of their scale to be fully ‘self perform’ with only limited and competitive involvement from the OEM.

Managed as four key projects, the programme delivered a new paradigm in O&M and begin the process of breaking down the OEM oligopoly position.

The two years of operation saw WTG Servicing performed ‘in house’ and two years of the best availability performance the asset had experienced.

In order to achieve this, Wind Turbine Safety Rules had to be created, all authorisations carried out, were the first accredited training organisation for WTSR, new management systems were created, new policies processes and documents drawn up and included in the management system and structure put in place to ensure successful delivery and value.

The team supported the first of its kind, objective, LIDAR measurement campaign to assess the AEP impact of leading edge erosion. As managers of one of the oldest offshore wind farms our knowledge of leading edge erosion, its causes and impacts is deep and potentially unrivalled.

The team were founding members and supporters of the BLEEP campaign. Managing blade life, warranty claims, and many innovations in blade work practices and technology.

The team managed a full transformer retrofit campaign at LID. Working closely with the OEM on the campaign to ensure the new design avoided the previous design issues. Helping the OEM with their analysis and driving and supporting delivery of the change out campaign. Commercial and technical expertise was utilised in achieving the best value for the owners, including providing robust challenge and governance.