Working alongside Vekta Group, the Hartree Centre North East Hub developed a tool to increase the accuracy in construction and commissioning timelines for new offshore wind farms to enable resource planning and financial forecasting.

Challenge

The offshore wind industry faces significant f inancial and logistical risks associated with project delays. Vekta Group Energy Division Limited (Vekta Group) needed a data-driven method to move beyond traditional estimation and explore the accurate prediction of construction and commissioning timelines of new wind farm projects, enabling better resource planning, risk mitigation, and financial forecasting.

Approach

Data Scientists from the Hartree Centre North East Hub worked with Vekta Group to develop a predictive model using a supervised machine learning methodology. The project involved a four-stage development pipeline: collating and exploring potential integration of wind farm-related datasets; engineering an initial dataset with key construction-based features; iteratively developing and testing models from a simple baseline to a more robust regression model; f inally resulting in the evaluation of the final model output. The approach culminated in a regularised Ridge Regression model that provides a useful model to begin estimating project timelines.

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Benefits

The proof-of-concept model provides Vekta Group with a quantitative, datadriven framework for estimating whole project timelines. The model created uses real-world data from most global offshore wind farms, predicts project timelines 33% more effectively than traditional averages. Its predictive power is confirmed by an R-squared score of 0.38-0.45, meaning the model can explain roughly 40% of the reasons why project times vary. The model and visualisations allow for insights into more precise financial planning and resource allocation, which can lead to more efficient processes.

Furthermore, the model’s feature importance analysis offers immediate, actionable insights into the primary drivers of whole project duration. The project has also provided a model framework and construction feature dataset as a springboard to produce more fine-grained models for project milestones.

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"The team have been extremely welcoming, supporting. And, it is reassuring to see that there has been an almost 30% improvement in this current model’s accuracy, versus what we are able to predict for offshore wind installation in general."

"The Hartree Centre North East Hub’s work has provided us with the first data-driven framework for predicting offshore project timelines. The insights from the data exploration and visualisation alone have been invaluable, and the baseline proof-of-concept model gives us a concrete tool to build upon for future operational use."

- Charles Balderston, Vekta Group

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Further Information

This work was completed as part of one of our collaborative data projects. The projects are up to 12 weeks in duration and give you access to a wide range of expertise across our team of data scientists and data engineers. We will work alongside your team to scope your data science or engineering project, build a prototype solution, and explore options to deploy it within your organisation. You can learn more about them on our webpage here.

If you would like to learn more about the Hartree Centre North East Hub or our collaborative data projects, please get in touch with us at: hello@hartreenortheast.uk

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