1 May 2025
New technology developed in Scotland looks set to tackle one of the most expensive and disruptive problems facing the global energy sector.
A single high-voltage cable fault in transmission networks and offshore wind developments can cost up to £1million per day in lost revenue.
The vast majority of these failures, almost 70%, originate not in the cables themselves, but in their joints and terminations.
These critical components are often out of sight and beyond the reach of conventional monitoring techniques, leaving operators vulnerable to sudden and financially catastrophic outages.
Synaptec has launched Greenlight™, a groundbreaking monitoring solution designed specifically to address this problem.
Greenlight provides continuous, automated visibility of all joints and terminations in a cable network, delivering early warnings of emerging faults before they become failures.
Designed for offshore wind farms and high-voltage power grids, it replaces manual inspection and reactive maintenance with a smarter, safer, and far more cost-effective approach to asset management.
“Greenlight gives operators control over the most unpredictable and expensive aspect of offshore cable operations and maintenance,”
said Dr Steven Blair, who is Vice President of Applications at Synaptec.
“It’s a system designed not just to collect data, but to deliver clear, early, and location specific insight that finds the early warning signs of failure.
“The return on investment is immediate – it pays for itself the first time it pre-empts an issue that would otherwise shut down a wind farm.”
The system is based on Synaptec’s patented Distributed Electrical Sensing (DES) technology, which uses fully passive sensors that require no power supply, no data networks, and no ongoing maintenance.
These sensors are easily retrofitted or embedded into cable joints and terminations at many locations over distances of up to 60 km from a substation.
Light from each sensor is sent via standard optical fibre to a central interrogator located at the substation. From there, Synaptec’s real-time analytics platform, Synthesis®, processes the data, highlights anomalies, and delivers actionable insights through automated alerts and a visual dashboard.
The impact of this visibility is transformative. With Greenlight in place, operators can identify and localise early signs of degradation, such as abnormal electrical currents, thermal stress, or evolving phase-to-screen ratios, at the exact location of the joint or termination at risk.
Rather than waiting for failure, maintenance teams can intervene precisely where needed and at the right time. Maintenance becomes targeted and efficient, and costly downtime is avoided.
Traditional cable monitoring approaches, such as DTS, DAS, online partial discharge or periodic ROV inspection, either fail to detect issues in joints and terminations or provide alerts too late to act.
Many of these techniques also require power, network infrastructure, or physical access to remote assets, adding complexity, cost, and safety risk. Greenlight removes those barriers. It operates passively, continuously, and accurately from day one, with no need for recalibration or field visits.
The first commercial Greenlight installations have already been deployed with offshore wind operators and transmission systems internationally. There are plans for further large-scale installations throughout 2025.
Learn more about Greenlight here, or get in touch to arrange a demonstration.