Page 53: of Marine Technology Magazine (November 2022)

engineers and technicians control the entire sonar campaign,

THE PLUG PULLED check the incoming raw data and prepare it for later analysis,”

ON OFFSHORE 1.0

Unlike the ? rst wind power boom 15years ago, the euphoria explains the economist and former submariner.

in the industry is still limited. Caution is more the right word: Compared to much larger competitors, Nicola Offshore, with 2022 was a good year for installed wind turbines, which gen- four of its own survey vessels, including three fast catamarans, erated 18 percent more electricity than in the previous year specializes in near-shore exploration missions, rapid deploy- and, at 122 terawatt hours, made the largest contribution to ment and high data quality. “We are literally the fast boats in the green electricity production in Germany. Nevertheless, the business. We keep our operations as lean and compact as possi- expansion of wind power has been in the doldrums for years. ble and offer all digital data handling as a package,” says Esser.

The decline began in 2018: suddenly, only half as many on- There is great interest in the maritime industry: subsidy re- shore and offshore wind turbines were built as in the previous ductions and competitive tendering procedures are forcing op- year. New capacity fell from 6.5 to not even 3.4GW. And it erators of capital-intensive offshore wind farms in particular to fell further to 1.7GW by 2021. In the current year 2022, just relentlessly reduce their costs and achieve ef? ciency gains. As 352MW of new wind capacity were connected to the grid. The a result, the price of wind power has fallen drastically in recent causes can largely be attributed to politics, which in the last years. Today, wind turbines are more pro? table than polluting decade cut wind power subsidies, reduced tendering areas, coal and gas-? red power plants, even on the high seas. piled up new bureaucratic hurdles and slept through the ex- In the long term, Esser hopes that technology will bring the pansion of the electricity grids for the transport of energy to marginal cost of collecting a new set of data at sea closer to the industrial regions in the south. The result was a wave of zero. A second company in which he has a stake is also working bankruptcies in the young boom industry, many thousands of on this and represents a new stage in offshore data collection.

skilled workers lost their jobs. The ambitious expansion tar- gets from the Easter package are now relying on an industry that has almost dissolved in this country.

OFFSHORE 2.0: SMALLER, (MORE)

DIGITAL & (MORE) NETWORKED

That’s why Daniel Esser doesn’t want to grow in the tradi- tional sense by hiring more staff and buying new ships, i.e. betting on the upswing with a lot of capital: “We’re scaling on the technology side, in the ef? ciency of our processes and in productivity.”

His company, Nicola Offshore, northwest of Hamburg, sends ships packed with state-of-the-art measurement tech- nology and engineers out onto the continental shelf. There, his small ? eet collects sensor data to map the seabed, detect

World War II munitions storage sites or check submarine ca- bles. Among his most important customers are energy com- panies that have to draw up plans, build foundations, operate and continuously maintain turbines for more offshore wind farms than ever before.

Esser’s company belongs to a new generation of start-ups whose business models address a weak point of the maritime sector: costs. Especially the costs caused by data.

In the case of an offshore wind farm, these are already in- curred on a large scale before construction begins. Its plan- ners have to scan the construction site for the foundations to check the suitability of the seabed, ocean currents and stones and munitions remnants. What would be done quickly on land sometimes takes weeks at sea and costs tens of thou- sands of euros - per day.

“Not only expensive special technology is used on our re- connaissance trips. On board, highly quali? ed measurement www.marinetechnologynews.com 53

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