Navantia and EOLOS Bringing Unmanned Technology to Offshore Wind O&M

Spain’s naval services provider Navantia and EOLOS Floating Lidar Solutions SL have signed an agreement for the development and commercial exploitation of services devoted to the inspection, diagnosis, and monitoring of offshore wind farms around the world using and operating unmanned marine vehicles combined with advanced meteorological data acquisition systems.

The two companies have signed an exclusivity agreement for the development and commercial roll-out of technology, products and services for the Operation and Maintenance of offshore wind farms using advanced sensor technology combined with unmanned marine and aerial vehicles.

Jordi Puigcorbé, Director of Innovation at EOLOS, said: ”Unmanned vehicle technologies, whether marine, aerial or especially the collaborative combination of both will be key to making Offshore Wind an increasingly competitive, automated source, with fewer safety risks and more balanced with the marine and environmental environments in which it operates.”

Demonstration tests in the real environment are expected to commence October this year off the Spanish coast where the Unmanned Service Vessel (USV) Vendaval from Navantia has been operating since 2019 being the first USV operating in commercial missions in Spain.

”NAVANTIA has made a firm commitment to green energy and offshore wind and we hope to contribute to promoting it development thanks to the latest generation technologies that we already apply in shipbuilding,” said Navantia’s Green Energy Director, Javier Herrador.

The agreement was announced during the exhibition Global Offshore Wind (GOW) that takes place in the United Kingdom, one of the biggest markets of offshore wind in the next years.

Abel Méndez Diaz, Commercial Director of Green Energy at NAVANTIA, stated that “this strategic alliance with EOLOS constitutes a great opportunity for our companies to collaborate and expand our range of products and services in the renewable energy sector, as well as a great leap in the development of civil technology for the global offshore wind industry. ”

EOLOS is a Spanish company dedicated to the measurement and characterisation of the meteoceanic conditions of marine sites at a global level for the offshore wind industry.

Rajai Aghabi, CEO of EOLOS, said: ”This collaboration will allow us to extend the services we offer to our clients and cover the entire life cycle of an offshore wind farm, that is, from its development phase to operation and maintenance combining NAVANTIA technology with our experience and infrastructure in global marine operations.”