Offshore Wind Installation Vessels Generating insight about the driving factors behind the future design

Abstract

To reach the sustainable targets and to reduce the investment risk, there is a need for more certainty and predictability regarding the requirements of the future offshore wind installation vessels. To capture the fast changing offshore wind market and its impact on vessel requirements, this paper generates scenarios using Epoch-era analysis. A parametric model is created to determine the performance of a set of vessels defined by their length, beam, depth, crane capacity, speed, and transport strategy in the different scenarios. The strength of combining Epoch-era analysis and parametric modelling is that the performance criteria and input variables can be tailor-made to a stakeholders strategy resulting in robust input variables for the concept vessel design.