Compared to traditional oil and gas infrastructure, offshore wind farms are difficult to protect. While both offshore wind farms and oil platforms are exposed to the harsh marine environment, they present distinct security challenges.
Here are some key reasons why wind farms can be more difficult to protect:
Offshore Wind Farm Security Challenges
Vast and Distributed Infrastructure/Large Footprint: Wind farms often cover extensive areas, making it challenging to monitor and secure every point. Apart from occasional maintenance and inspection teams they are usually unmanned – making unauthorised occupation much easier.
Remote Locations: Many turbines are situated in remote, often isolated locations, increasing the difficulty of rapid response to threats.
Vulnerability to Physical Attacks:
Accessibility: The sheer number of turbines and their accessibility, especially for smaller vessels, makes them potential targets for physical attacks, such as sabotage or vandalism. The subsea cabling used to transfer generated electricity is also highly vulnerable both to environmental and malicious damage due to its seabed location
Drone Threats: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) pose a growing threat, capable of carrying out surveillance, disruption, or even physical attacks on turbines.
Cybersecurity Risks:
Complex Systems: Modern wind farms rely on sophisticated control systems, making them susceptible to cyberattacks.
Data-Driven Operations: The increasing reliance on data for optimisation and maintenance exposes wind farms to data breaches and cyber espionage.
Environmental Constraints:
Marine Ecosystem: Many wind farms are located in ecologically sensitive areas, limiting the use of traditional security measures that could harm the environment.
Weather Challenges: Extreme weather conditions can disrupt security operations and hinder response efforts.
Economic Value:
High-Value Targets: Wind farms represent significant investments, making them attractive targets for sabotage or theft.
Energy Security: Disruptions to wind farms can impact energy supply and have broader economic consequences.
While the oil and gas industry has a long history of dealing with security threats, the unique characteristics of wind farms present new challenges that require innovative solutions and a multi-layered approach to security. This post will examine the role of incident management/emergency response in the context of offshore wind farms.
Operations Training Simulators For Offshore Wind Farms
Pisys have been serving the emergency response market for decades, with their range of operational training simulators which can be configured to provide a highly realistic representation of any asset. We started with Jack Up rigs, FPSO’s and production platforms, historically delivered by a training company in one of our physical training modules which can even replicate vessel movement using electric motors if required.
The lockdown period hit the training sector hard – nobody wanted to travel let alone spend time in close proximity to colleagues. However incidents were still happening and training companies still saw a demand for their services.We therefore decided to invest in migrating our training simulator platform to the cloud, to give students a highly realistic representation of actual incidents and emergency response scenarios.
As you might imagine, creating an authentic online representation of an emergency or incident is non-trivial. Our main challenge was around how audio is handled. If you’ve ever been in a busy incident room you will know that there’s a lot of noise – phone calls and conversations etc – so we needed a way to allow remote staff to interact as if they were in a real room. However, when we’d finished we immediately saw a demand from existing and new clients in the training sector. We even saw OPITO accrediting courses based on our cloud based system.
Our virtual Operations Training Simulator can be configured to allow a huge range of training scenarios for Emergency and Incident Response teams who don’t need to travel to a training centre to participate.
Example Training Simulation
Here’s an example we created for a client with a large investment in offshore wind. They wanted to prepare for the unexpected detection of a small vessel moving towards one of their wind farms. We created a simulation which included:
- A dynamic plot showing the unauthorised vessel as well as the other vessels in the area and coastguard helicopter
- A simulated BBC news feed announcing that a environmental activists were in the process of occupying the wind farm
- An incident log which allowed events to be recorded as the incident progressed
- ‘Radio comms’ allowing roleplay of vessel staff and coastguard etc by the instructors – The team were able to interface with other vessels in the area to assist in identification of what turned out to be a zodiac boat travelling at speed towards the installation. An emergency was declared since the intentions of the vessel were unclear.
- Full POB lists of all vessels in the area were made available.
- A fully functioning phone switchboard allowing teams to communicate
- An internal email system
- Simulated weather reports
A number of students were able to collaborate to resolve the incident, with shared access to the cloud-based system from various locations worldwide. Instructors were able to both monitor the progress of the exercise and also alter the course of events as time passed. Post exercise the trainers and students were able to replay sections of the exercise for review, to study specific learning points.