Kinewell Energy’s revolutionary KLOC software has been shortlisted for two prestigious international innovation awards. The software, developed in North Tyneside, UK, can reduce the cost of Offshore Wind by up to £30m per GW through more efficient inter-array cable layouts. Between Europe, Asia and North America, 250 GW of offshore wind projects are planned.
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is a global engineering community of over 167,000 members worldwide in 150 countries and holds an innovation award annually. Kinewell Energy’s KLOC software has been selected from over 300 entries from 28 countries as a 2016 finalist in two categories; Power and Model Based Engineering.
Managing Director Andrew Jenkins said, “We are delighted to have been selected as a finalist, standing alongside some of the biggest names of the industry, in what is arguably the most prestigious innovation award of the electrical engineering community. The KLOC software represents a step change in the way offshore wind cable systems are designed; allowing developers to make more informed decisions leading to a lower levelised cost of energy, which ultimately will follow through positively onto household bills.”
The Kinewell Layout Optimisation of Cable (KLOC) software designs the geographic electrical connections that link offshore wind turbines to a substation with subsea cables, collecting the power before sending it to shore. A typical project has 75-350 turbines, each separated by around 1000 m and cable costing around £600/m. A typical system installation cost is upwards of £70m, meaning any small percentage improvements can deliver significant added value; Kinewell Energy optimises the cable layout. Using KLOC, Kinewell Energy has redesigned the currently operating Gwynt-y-Mor (576 MW) offshore wind farm cable layout; yielding savings of £2.2m, or 3% of the installed cable cost.
KLOC creates inter-array layout designs by utilising an evolutionary based algorithm. A single iteration of the algorithm considers a small subset of the network and re-designs it. With many iterations, the best areas of the network are kept while re-designing the sub-optimal areas. KLOC is extremely fast at doing this, allowing good designs to be found within seconds.
Although KLOC is based around offshore wind, it is transferrable to many other types of projects. Kinewell Energy can optimise the inter-connection design of any number of nodes with multiple collection locations. This enables wind turbines, tidal generators, oil and gas pumps to be connected to electrical substations or central processing facilities with electrical power cables, communication cables or pipelines.