Harnessing Data with OceanBrain to Make Subsea Cables Even More Robust

Some of the world’s most critical infrastructure lies beneath the ocean floor. There are around 4,000 subsea power and telecom cables globally—in fact, those telecom cables facilitate more than 95 percent of the world’s internet and phone connectivity. Subsea electricity interconnectors, which are growing rapidly in number, allow energy to be transferred between countries, helping distribute clean power where it’s needed and keeping costs low for consumers.

National Grid, for instance, operates five interconnectors to Europe that together power 5 million homes; a sixth is under construction. By the end of the decade, National Grid estimates those subsea energy highways will have spared the UK around 100 million tons of carbon dioxide by replacing fossil fuel with clean sources.

But with energy security more important than ever, how do you monitor the health of cables that run under the seabed?  “With cables on land, you can go and walk the route, you can check to see what people are doing and send inspection crews out,” said Gerard Kelly, vice president of innovation for National Grid Partners. But gathering up-to-date information on conditions under the vast and unpredictable sea can be more challenging.

One potential hazard for submarine cables: fishing trawlers, which drag heavy nets and chains across the ocean floor to scoop up fish. While the cables are buried and designed to withstand impact, repeated trawling can increase the odds of strikes—or shift the seabed to leave them exposed. Climate effects also can move the sea floor.

With these complications in mind, National Grid Partners developed a digital tool called OceanBrain to modernize how undersea cables are monitored. It combines complex data sources (including cable location, burial depth and seabed type) with machine learning to automatically quantify the risk of potential damage.

Better information can give cable operators (and insurers) a better idea of how their infrastructure might fare in the future. And with real-time alerts, crews can make adjustments to manage those risks, reduce the chances of outages, and keep renewable energy flowing.

To achieve this goal, National Grid Partners and its sister company, National Grid Ventures, first worked with a group of marine domain specialists to quantify the risk of trawler strikes.

Every vessel above a certain size transmits its location using AIS transponders. By combining this with external data sets and machine learning algorithms, the software was able to identify whether a trawler was actively fishing, with its drag-nets deployed.

“That data gives you a real-time risk assessment, but it also means you can do a historical risk assessment,” Davies said. “So you can look at where and when certain parts of the cable may be vulnerable.” If a particular area attracts lots of fishing in the month of June, for example, it might be wise to check on that area more frequently in early summer.

This year, the team will complete a minimum viable product (MVP) that will be deployed to four National Grid Ventures interconnectors. If the deployment is successful, it will be expanded to additional cables—and potentially to outside companies that operate other cables. As the OceanBrain project progresses, the team also plans to improve the model with insights from other data sets such as weather patterns and seabed type.

Transmitting power smoothly will be key to decarbonization efforts throughout Europe. The UK, for example, has committed to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050—a project that hinges on the country’s ability to harness offshore wind power. That means minimizing outages; after all, a cable that’s under maintenance can’t move energy.