Innovation Competition 2023

RWE is one of the world's leading offshore wind companies. As a market leader, we are dedicated to exploring and supporting innovative solutions that can accelerate the pace of deploying offshore wind. And we are keen to explore specific research issues and pilot projects with companies, start-ups and individuals around the world.

In 2023 in our second global Innovation Competition we were seeking for innovative solutions that enhance system integration, circularity and environmental protection in offshore wind.
From a large number of high-quality applications, Indeximate emerged as the winner.

Winner of the 2023 Innovation Competition:

Indeximate Ltd., a start-up founded in the UK in 2022, has developed an innovative fibre optic sensing based approach, which can support preventive maintenance of subsea cables, and at the same time monitor vessel traffic as well as the underwater environment, and thus build a picture of the ecology pattern of marine life in offshore wind farms.

For monitoring, Indeximate uses sensing data recorded from the fiber optic cable network in the wind farm. Industry proven fibre optic sensing turns the power cable into a continuous series of sensitive strain and vibration monitors. Think of a position on the cable that might be rubbing on rocks, if you could listen right there you could measure the severity when it moves during the tidal flow and compare it to other buried or static sections of cable. But the noise is buried amongst the background of other subsea noises. Sensing technology enables this source of raw data, but it creates a lot of data and relevant phenomena only become visible when data is analyzed over hours, days, weeks and months. Such amounts of data, accumulated over long periods of time, were previously unthinkable for operators and their service providers and so this approach has not been exploited. The innovative element of Indeximate's solution is therefore the 'indeximation' of the recorded data. Their proprietary compression approach makes it possible to share this data to the cloud where it can easily be stored and analysed. This enables a more detailed and targeted analysis of acoustic signals in the underwater world where the many overlapping small trends can be pulled out and made meaningful. With the help of the data accumulated and processed by Indeximate, it is finally possible to carry out a more detailed and targeted analysis of acoustic signals in the underwater world.

RWE and Indeximate signed a letter of intent to jointly assess the opportunity to pilot Indeximate’s technology at the RWE-operated Arkona offshore wind farm, located 35 kilometers northeast of the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea.

To website

“The innovative element of their solution is the ‘Indeximation’ of acoustic data, ensuring a more detailed and targeted analysis of acoustic signatures in the subsea soundscape. In addition to cable condition monitoring, this system will provide for vessel as well as marine mammal identification and tracking. The technology has thus great potential for creating exciting insights into the ecological systems and supporting the preventive maintenance of RWE’s global offshore wind fleet.”