Daragh O'Connor

Daragh O’Connor joins the Sustainable Energy Authorities of Ireland’s project REMOTE-WIND as a PhD Researcher which focuses on bespoke autonomous inspection and monitoring of onshore/offshore wind turbines. Accurately assessing a turbine's lifetime safety and serviceability performance allows industry to make better decisions around maintenance, repowering and decommissioning. 

Following his time as a researcher in the Fluids and Vibrations Laboratory in Trinity College Dublin and subsequently as a research technician in the Photovoltaic Materials and Design Group in TUDelft, Daragh plans to implement cutting edge data analytics to further improve the monitoring and control of wind turbines in the Irish market.

REMOTE-WIND will be transformative in terms of how maintenance is carried out for these turbines and positively impact their annual maintenance contract terms, leading to better support of Irish businesses. It will establish monitoring at the core of a renewable energy policy and provide Irish thought leadership globally in this niche and strongly bourgeoning sector.

The results from this project will de-risk the wind energy sector, lower Operations and Maintenance costs leading to improvement in Levelized Cost of Electricity and improve the Health and Safety of inspection workers. It will also create a critical and demonstrative evidence base for such monitoring to be commercially carried out in Ireland.

Supervisor:  Dr Bidisha Ghosh