Advancing the life, resilience and sustainability of offshore renewable energy infrastructure

Offshore renewable energy plays a vital role in achieving UK’s Net Zero target by strengthening energy security and delivering a more sustainable energy system.

ORElab brings together research on the durability, structural integrity and lifecycle management of offshore renewable energy infrastructure. The platform provides a home for multidisciplinary research, collaboration, knowledge exchange and public engagement across offshore renewable energy research community.

While ORElab has a broad offshore renewable energy vision, the platform is currently primarily dedicated to the activities and outcomes of the "Offshore Wind Infrastructure Design Evolution with Provision for Life Extension (WIND-PROLIFE)", research programme; a 5-year EPSRC Open Fellowship (2026-2031) which aims to develop the engineering knowledge, experimental evidence and predictive tools needed to extend the safe operational life of offshore wind infrastructure. WIND-PROLIFE aims to position the UK as a global leader in the safe and sustainable life extension of offshore renewable energy infrastructure.

Around 50% of the currently installed offshore wind turbines in the UK are expected to reach the end of their initial design life within the next decade. Decisions on whether these nationally important assets should be decommissioned, repowered or safely retained in operation must be supported by robust engineering evidence.

WIND-PROLIFE is developing a holistic approach to understanding and extending the life of offshore wind support structures. The programme considers how structural performance is influenced by the complete asset lifecycle, from manufacturing and installation to long-term operation in harsh offshore environments.

Through advanced material characterisation, fatigue and corrosion-fatigue testing, residual stress measurements, probabilistic analysis and multi-scale computational modelling, WIND-PROLIFE aims to reveal the residual life concealed by existing conservative design and assessment methods and enable safer, better-informed asset-management decisions.

WIND-PROLIFE investigates the principal processes governing the long-term integrity of offshore wind infrastructure:

Manufacturing quality, fabrication processes and welding effects
Installation and operational loading
Residual stresses and their redistribution
Long-term fatigue behaviour in air and seawater
Corrosion, pitting and material ageing
Fatigue crack initiation and propagation
Probabilistic and numerical life prediction methods
Inspection-informed integrity assessment
Repair, surface treatment and life-enhancement strategies

These interconnected research areas support a new ‘design and operation by knowledge’ approach, in which inspection and structural health monitoring information can be used throughout an asset’s life to update damage estimates, predict its remaining life and inform decisions about continued operation or intervention.