Vibration Monitoring of Offshore Wind Turbine Foundations During Construction and Commissioning
The iX programme is supporting ScottishPower Renewables, part of the Iberdrola Group, to find innovators who can provide a low cost, standalone, battery powered device that records structural vibration data from an offshore wind turbine sub-structures from the point of installation until the turbine is fully commissioned and its permanent condition monitoring systems are available. The device must log data locally for manual retrieval, operate for at least six months without external power, suit both monopile and jacket foundations, and be affordable enough to deploy on every foundation of a project.
Opportunity
Challenge opens
15/09/2026
Challenge closes
30/10/2026
Benefit
ScottishPower Renewables is looking for a low cost, standalone, battery powered vibration monitoring and logging device for offshore wind turbine sub-structures, covering the period between foundation installation and full turbine commissioning. Selected solution provider(s) may have the opportunity to present their solution to ScottishPower Renewables. It is also possible that further activities may be undertaken, such as a benchmarking trial on an operational wind farm alongside existing, permanent structural monitoring instrumentation, with the potential for volume deployment across the ScottishPower Renewables construction pipeline and reuse across successive projects. This is not guaranteed and will be solely at the discretion of ScottishPower Renewables.
Background
ScottishPower Renewables
ScottishPower Renewables (SPR) is part of the ScottishPower group of companies, operating in the UK under the Iberdrola Group, one of the world's largest electricity utilities and a global leader in wind energy. SPR is developing the East Anglia Hub in the southern North Sea, a group of offshore windfarms with a combined planned capacity of more than 3.9GW (Source: Iberdrola).
SPR’s East Anglia ONE windfarm (714 MW, 102 turbines on jacket foundations) has been operational since 2020. East Anglia THREE, developed with Masdar, is under construction approximately 69 km off the Suffolk coast and will comprise 95 turbines of 14.7 MW on monopile foundations, giving a capacity of 1,400 MW when it enters operation, scheduled for the end of 2026. East Anglia TWO (up to 960 MW) and East Anglia ONE North (up to 800 MW) are consented and will follow (Source: ScottishPower Renewables).
This build out sits within a rapidly growing market. The UK has around 14.8 GW of offshore wind in operation and a government target of 43 to 50 GW by 2030 (Source: UK Government, Clean Power 2030 Action Plan).
Figure 1: An image of an offshore wind transition piece internal, image source: Simandjuntak, S., Bausch, N., Farrar, A. S., Ahuir-Torres, J., Thomas, B., & Muna, J. (2021). iWindCr field trial and electrochemical analysis for corrosion detection and monitoring offshore wind turbine's MP-TP steel components. Journal of Marine Engineering & Technology.
Offshore wind construction and commissioning
Figure 2: In offshore wind the term foundation covers the whole support structure, both the substructure (monopile or jacket) and the transition piece on top. The turbine is the tower, nacelle and rotor above it. The device in this challenge sits inside the transition piece.
An offshore windfarm is built in stages. Foundations are installed first: either a monopile driven into the seabed with a transition piece (TP) grouted on top, or a jacket structure secured on piles. The TP and the foundation are rigidly connected and behave as one structure. Turbines are installed later, and the array cables, offshore substation and grid connection are completed in parallel workstreams. The date of first power depends on the onshore grid connection, which is outside the developer’s control and is frequently delayed. It is therefore common for foundations, and often fully erected turbines, to stand offshore for months before power and communications are available. On some SPR projects this window has typically been up to six months, and individual turbines have in the past taken a year or more to commission.
The monitoring gap
Until a turbine is commissioned, it is effectively unpowered and unmonitored. The OEM supplied condition monitoring and SCADA systems, including structural accelerometers, rely on grid power, and the operator does not always have access to every data channel even once they are running. Dedicated structural monitoring systems are typically installed on only a small representative sample of positions: on one operational SPR site, around a dozen of just over 100 foundations carry such systems, selected because a specific risk was already known.
During this unmonitored window, a parked or idling turbine can experience high vibration, particularly where excitation approaches the natural frequency of the foundation alone or of the combined foundation and turbine structure. Some turbine models offer a self-idling mode that uses limited battery power to keep the nacelle yawed into the wind, but the reliability of these systems during the pre-commissioning period has been mixed.
Industry experience, including SPR’s own, is that severe resonance events can occur while turbines wait for grid connection, for example when a stopped rotor is held at an unfavourable angle to the wind, or when turbines stand in partial states of assembly, or in extreme cases a vessel impact or vortexing at the seabed. Each event consumes foundation fatigue life, yet today the operator has no record of what happened, when, under which conditions, or how much life was used. That record matters for safety, for warranty, insurance and claims discussions, and for future decisions on asset life extension.
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