Challenges and Approaches to Extending the Safe Operational Life of Future Renewable Energy Infrastructure
Authors: Tan Mike Yongjun 
Published: December 2024

To decarbonize our economy, a huge network of renewable energy infrastructure will need to be built both onshore and offshore, often at remote locations, to generate and transmit renewable energy, and to convert and store renewable energy. Corrosion and other forms of materials degradation will pose major challenges to critical components of renewable energy infrastructure that often operate in extreme and complex environmental conditions. Currently solar and wind farms are designed only for approximately 25 years due to the degradation of solar panels and wind turbines. Such a short design life is unsustainable, not only from lifecycle assessment point of view, but also for generating significant materials wastage. The lives of batteries, hydrogen electrolysers and fuel cells are also significantly affected by corrosion and materials degradation. Addressing these issues is critical for the feasibility and sustainability of future renewable energy-based economy. Corrosion engineering is expected to play an important role in the emerging renewable energy economy in order to address these issues and challenges. Unfortunately, although substantial progress has been made in corrosion science and engineering over the past decades, major weaknesses exist in the management and control of corrosion of engineering structures exposed to complex engineering environments. This problem becomes even more acute when complex forms of localized corrosion occur on ‘invisible’ and highly variable engineering structures such as underground energy pipelines and offshore wind farms. In most practical cases, the failure of engineering structures is due to unexpected and complex forms of localized damages. The safe service life of an engineering structure is often determined by the ‘worst case scenario’ localized corrosion such as corrosion under disbonded coatings on buried steel pipelines. Effective control and management of localized forms of corrosion in complex environments is probably the most significant issue that has not yet been sufficiently addressed by corrosion engineering. In particular, the prediction, detection and prevention of localized forms of corrosion in complex environments remain the most significant challenges to corrosion engineering.

This paper critically reviews the challenges and issues in extending the safe operational life of renewable energy infrastructure in complex environments and discusses potential approaches to overcoming these challenges. It is shown that localized corrosion control is a critical issue that has to be addressed in corrosion science and engineering. Although various approaches to localized corrosion control can be taken in the future to help addressing these issues and challenges, the most practical approach to addressing major challenges of localized corrosion to future renewable energy infrastructure could probably be based on reliable and more effective localised corrosion prediction, detection and control. A prerequisite for achieving such effective and reliable corrosion management is timely knowledge about the initiation, propagation and seriousness of localized corrosion occurring over an engineering structure in order to take timely corrective actions. Currently accurate and reliable localized corrosion prediction in practical engineering structures is very difficult, if not impossible. Current industrial knowledge of localized corrosion is mostly from time based routine inspections using various condition assessment and in-line inspection tools. Although corrosion data from such inspection are useful for identifying longer-term corrosion trends, they often do not have sufficient temporal and spatial resolutions required for predicting dynamic changes in complex localized corrosion including these in renewable energy systems. Acquiring corrosion data more frequently and more reliably is necessary not only for early warning of unanticipated structural failure but also for evaluating the efficiency of corrosion control measures such as cathodic protection, corrosion inhibitors and protective coatings. It is concluded that future corrosion management of renewable energy infrastructure will need to incorporate advanced corrosion monitoring tools, data analytics, artificial intelligence and predictive modelling in order to achieve quantitative, accurate and reliable corrosion prediction and closed-loop smart corrosion control. More specifically, (i) the maintenance and management of future energy infrastructures will require more reliable and accurate corrosion forecast and prediction capabilities for more effective detection, monitoring and control of corrosion on infrastructure exposed to complex and variable environments. (ii) Future energy infrastructure will require more efficient corrosion protection technologies, especially those able to control localized forms of corrosion, in order to extend the service life of future renewable energy infrastructures. (iii) New eco-informed and environmentally friendly anti-corrosion materials and methods will be required to meet progressively strict regulations for environmental protection. Cases are presented from the author’s recent research and development over the past decade.

Key references:

Y Tan, Heterogeneous Electrode Processes and Localized Corrosion, Wiley (2012)

Y M Tan, Localized Corrosion in Complex Environments, Wiley (2023)