Wind power plays a central role in the energy transition at EnBW, one of the largest energy companies in Europe. To develop projects most efficiently, the energy giant is undergoing a digital transformation process. In the offshore wind space, Vind AI plays an important role in their new digital ways of working.
“Assessing projects manually project-by-project is the old world. This is the new way of working,” says Adam Verhoeven-Mrosek, Project Analyst Offshore at EnBW.
“The usability in Vind AI is fantastic compared to anything I’ve used in the past. I’ve worked in the business for more than 15 years and I’ve analysed wind projects in many different ways, and being able to do all these things in a real high-quality set up in Vind AI is really a gamechanger. It’s a different galaxy. It’s much faster.”
Adam Verhoven-Mrosek, Project Analyst Offshore, EnBW
EnBW uses Vind AI primarily for site assessments and business case evaluations.
Beyond the “very fast calculations,” (or what the EnBW team refers to as the “fastliness” of the platform) EnBW finds huge value from Vind AI enabling transparent comparability across possible new projects.
“We can run sensitivities and a wide range of scenarios across several projects, and the results are comparable for the different projects because we’re doing it all in the same platform,” says Lisa Scheele, Technical Case Manager Offshore Wind at EnBW, who works on early-phase projects and has been an early adopter of Vind AI, using the platform since early 2023. “For example, what if the assumed turbine price changes? How does that impact different projects? Using Vind AI, we can quickly get a range of where we land in different scenarios.”
The integrated financial analysis in combination with technical analysis, like layout and yield optimisation, is what the EnBW team values most when running scenarios.
“We can see the whole business case in Vind AI,”
Adam Verhoeven-Mrosek, Project Analyst Offshore, EnBW
“It’s fast and easy to play around with different CAPEX assumptions, or possible delays. In Vind AI, we can see the impacts those variations could have,” says Lisa Scheele.
As a result, the early-phase team can quickly provide internal decision-makers with the comparable information they need to select the best-performing business cases, taking into account financial variables as well as technical factors.
.jpg)
Alongside speedy analysis, the EnBW offshore wind team sees Vind AI’s Library functionality as transformative. Here, they can store, manage, and share various company resources like data on turbines, foundations, cables, project configurations, and GIS layers while flexibly managing user access control.
“By standardising our building blocks we can build all our wind farms in a standardised way,” says Lisa Scheele, Technical Case Manager Offshore Wind at EnBW.
At EnBW, their decision to use Vind AI across all their early phase offshore wind projects is also helping inform and guide the standardisation process itself.
“We’re now considering what we need to create to deliver standards that we can calculate with Vind AI,” says Adam Verhoeven-Mrosek, Project Analyst Offshore at EnBW. “Using Vind AI helps us to structure our own standardisation ideas.”
In combination with EnBW’s internal digitalisation process, Vind AI simplifies and speeds up EnBW’s analysis process for early phase offshore wind projects. Instead of having to manually request input numbers from many different team members in EnBW’s extensive teams of engineers, the numbers are all instantly available to the whole team within the Vind AI platform.
“A few clicks and then you have everything you need,” Lisa Scheele says. “Instead of spending a week chasing down all the information you need from different people.”
“With Vind AI, we can now have two people develop a business case for a new site in roughly four weeks. This is more than 5x faster than it would typically take using traditional ways, and this would also require a bigger team. Now, with Vind, you still need the engineers’ logic, so the tool is not replacing engineers, but we can work a lot faster.”
Adam Verhoven-Mrosek, Project Analyst Offshore, EnBW
The EnBW team sees digital tools already transforming the wind industry by enabling standardisation across projects, and quick comparability of projects and scenarios at an early stage.
“Compared to other tools, using Vind saves so much effort,” says Lisa Scheele. “In other tools for example you can’t easily change and reverse your choices.”
“You can do 80% of the work in 20% of the time, which leaves you with more time to evaluate and discuss, Vind AI is a powerful engine which we use now and we see all the potential in it."
Adam Verhoven-Mrosek, Project Analyst Offshore, EnBW
As an early adopter of Vind AI, EnBW has informed the platform’s development over the last years.
“EnBW is a frontrunner in understanding the potential of digitalisation for wind project development,” says Helene Bøhler, CEO and Co-founder of Vind AI. “Their expert engineers have provided invaluable input to our platform, and we look forward to continuing to drive standardisation in the wind industry together.”
