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Simply Blue Group
From weeks to days: Simply Blue Group streamlines offshore wind
workflows with Vind AI
From weeks to days: Simply Blue Group streamlines offshore wind
workflows with Vind AI
Simply Blue Group were predominantly looking for a layout tool for their offshore wind projects, when they found Vind AI in 2023. At the time, the team was working with many different software products and spreadsheets, and they undertook their offshore wind layouts manually, or through external consultants.
Now, the team uses Vind AI throughout their early stage, conceptual project design workflows for developing and iterating turbine layouts and associated electrical configurations.
“The ability to rapidly explore layout alternatives and evaluate their impact on overall project financials has made Vind AI a valuable tool in the early-stage design process,” says James Croftson, Technical Manager at Simply Blue Group.
Simply Blue Group is also exploring Vind’s full suite of capabilities, including its use as an energy yield tool and a financial modelling tool. The team is looking to use these features to support and complement their processes for early-stage project conceptual design and business case modelling.
“With Vind AI, one platform provides a holistic view of the whole project,” says James Croftson.
“When I heard how quick Vind AI was I jumped on the platform to test it and I was really impressed. It’s brilliant to have all the data and analysis for many different workflow steps in one place."
James Croftson, Technical Manager, Simply Blue Group.
Before discovering Vind AI, Simply Blue Group’s team spent a lot of time toggling between different software products and spreadsheets, manually transferring data between them. In particular, any changes to the layouts or yield calculations would require a new round of exporting and inputting the relevant data into different parts of the business case model. Without the holistic approach offered by the Vind AI platform, the team sometimes needed to run many different iterative loops, using different tools, to complete each step of the analysis.
“Vind AI allows us to do multiple phases of our workflow concurrently, for example onsite layouts including turbines, offshore substation locations, export cable corridors and inter array cables. Not having to do manual iterations and loop back between different tools is a big win in terms of the time saved,” says James Croftson.
Considering the various workflows involved in developing and comparing two different project configurations, Simply Blue Group estimates the duration of traditional workflows that previously would have taken roughly 5 weeks could be cut down to only 6 days by using Vind AI.
"The more configurations you want to run on a project, the greater the time saved when using Vind AI compared to traditional methods. One new configuration might take a single day in Vind AI, instead of 2-3 weeks. So, you get a rapidly growing scale of time saved when considering the iterative nature of project development activities, scaled up across a broad portfolio.”
James Croftson, Technical Manager, Simply Blue Group.
The extensive time saved means Simply Blue Group can now make use of its in-house team’s capabilities to a much greater extent—which creates significant cost savings, while the team can still expand how much analysis they can complete for each early stage project. In particular, their central team of engineers can say yes to more scenario analysis requests from projects teams than they could previously.
“That we can do it so much quicker is hugely helpful. If a project asks, can you run a quick scenario? Yes, easy-peasy. It might take a couple of hours rather than a week.”
Emily Summers, Project Development Engineer, Offshore Wind, Statkraft
“With Vind AI, we also know that our project assessments are comparative, no matter where in the world they are,” James Croftson adds. “We have projects in different countries, on different continents. If you have to rely on external consultants to drive this work for each project, it can be difficult to know if you are being fully consistent in your central assumptions. In terms of making informed portfolio-level recommendations and decisions, the opportunity to mitigate significant corporate-level risks by using Vind AI is substantial.”
In addition, the speed of Vind AI’s analysis enables Simply Blue Group to rapidly establish an informed position on new offshore wind areas. This allows for a comprehensive and well-considered response to government consultations, within the available response timeframes. “When a government consults industry on new possible sites, we can review the capacity of the sites in Vind AI instantly, allowing us to be well-informed when responding to consultations,” Emily Summers explains. “In general, Vind supports us to react very quickly to changes.”
The transparent approach to the calculations in the Vind AI platform gives the team increased confidence in the analysis outputs.
“It’s so easy to find the explanation in the platform of how something is calculated, so you have confidence in the outputs, since you can trace them back. Some tools are a black box and it takes a lot more effort to understand what’s going on. Here, it’s within the tool in a really user friendly way”
Emily Summers, Project Development Engineer, Simply Blue Group.
This is particularly valuable in early-stage modelling, where assumptions may need to be taken in the absence of measured data. In such contexts, having transparency not only about how calculations are performed, but also about what assumptions are made and what is included (and what isn’t) is just as important as the results themselves.
Simply Blue Group finds it hugely valuable to be able to request new additions to the Vind AI platform, and to see those requests being actioned and implemented quickly. For example, Simply Blue Group has provided input and help shape how inter-array cable topologies are represented for electrical layout design, as well as how foundations (especially for floating offshore wind with mooring and anchor spreads) are considered during site layout generation.
“We’re part of something being actively developed,” James Croftson says. “The level of proactive engagement from, and with, the Vind AI team throughout the last 18 months has been highly rewarding.”
“How Vind AI takes on feedback really quickly stands out from other software companies. I’m hugely impressed by the speed of implementing capabilities that we’ve flagged as useful additions.”
Emily Summers, Project Development Engineer, Simply Blue Group.
“When we speak with the Vind AI team, we get to speak directly with the specialists who are doing the coding, not a project manager. That really impacts the speed at which the platform can develop.”
Simply Blue Group’s finance team is now also starting to explore and use Vind AI’s financial functionalities in conjunction with their own in-house tools. Together, the finance and technical teams can run an integrated ‘techno-economic’ workflow, all within Vind AI.
As the platform continues to grow, Simply Blue Group’s team will continue to evaluate how they can use it throughout their project development process.
“It was hard for me to foresee the speed at which Vind AI has been able to develop over the last 18 months,” James Crofton says. “The platform has kept on defying my expectations with how many new capabilities have been developed since we started using it.”
