Analytics System for Subsea Power Cable Maintenance Launched

Indeximate, a provider of fiber sensing-based subsea power cable health monitoring to the offshore wind energy industry, has officially launched its Scattersphere® platform.

Scattersphere is a non-intrusive, hardware-agnostic solution to replace one-off alarms with analysis of continuous health behavior and highlight cable failure risks before they become a threat to asset integrity.

Proprietary data compression technology allows Scattersphere to access and analyze petabytes of data stored in the cloud without loss of fidelity and to continually process long-term risk profiles for monitored cables.

Understanding how cables behave under real-world conditions over time provides an early warning of potential fatigue, abrasion or strain and allows cable operators to plan maintenance and replacement in advance and at lower cost.

Based in the cloud and supported by Indeximate’s expert analytics team, Scattersphere assists asset owners with ongoing condition assessment and forensic investigation. Unlike traditional monitoring systems that offer only periodic snapshots, Scattersphere captures and analyses a continuous stream of fiber-optic data along the full length of each cable, providing unprecedented visibility of cable behavior.

The system harnesses Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) – a technology that transforms standard optical fibers embedded within power cables into thousands of precise vibration and strain sensors. This continuous sensing network allows operators to detect minute changes in acoustic and mechanical response that can signal developing fatigue, abrasion, or movement of the cable and its protection system.

By combining this DAS data with vessel AIS information, meteorological and oceanographic inputs, and power production data, Scattersphere builds a complete, real-world picture of each cable’s condition and performance. The system’s automated analytics then identify emerging risk signatures, enabling operators to act months or even years before damage occurs.

Applicable for array cables, export cables and even interconnectors, Scattersphere addresses one of the sector’s most persistent challenges – the high cost and frequency of cable failure. Across the UK offshore wind market alone, unplanned cable failure has cost more than £3.5 billion in lost earnings over the past 15 years. Repairing a single export cable can exceed £6 million, with downtime adding tens of millions more. The continuous picture of asset health provided by Scattersphere can reduce failures by as much as 75% and deliver measurable reductions in operational risk and insurance exposure.