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From the Bentley Year in Infrastructure (YII) 2025 Going Digital Awards Series
Digital transformation is reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace—from “precision profiling” in retail to “one-stop government services” in public administration, and from “robots replacing human labor” on factory floors to “digital twins” for cloud-based collaboration. The annual Year in Infrastructure (YII) Going Digital Awards showcase cutting-edge applications of digital technologies such as AI, cloud platforms, and digital twins.
This year, Bentley YII 2025 received nearly 250 projects from 47 countries and regions. An independent jury, including ARC Advisory Group, selected winners across 12 categories and 18 Founder’s Honor Awards. Projects from China won four awards: Baosteel Engineering & Technology Group (Energy Production category), China Energy Engineering Group Guangxi Electric Power Design Institute (Energy Delivery category), PowerChina Henan Electric Power Survey & Design Institute (Founder’s Honor Award), and Shanghai Investigation, Design & Research Institute (Founder’s Honor Award). These four projects will be introduced one by one in this four-part series.
Shanghai Investigation, Design & Research Institute: Building a Digital Benchmark for the Full Lifecycle of Offshore Wind Power
Shanghai Investigation, Design & Research Institute (SIDRI), founded in 1954, has grown into a large-scale, Class-A comprehensive design institute capable of providing whole-process engineering consulting and full-industry-chain services. From China’s first large-scale hydropower station independently designed and constructed by the nation to the first batch of RCC dams over 100 meters high, from the country’s first tidal power plant to its first million-kilowatt-class offshore wind farm, and from the world’s largest freshwater reservoir in a tidal estuary avoiding saltwater intrusion to new models for integrated water management (“Plant-Network-River-Lake-Shore Integration”) and holistic ecosystem management (“Mountains-Rivers-Forests-Farmlands-Lakes-Grasslands-Deserts Integration”), SIDRI has created dozens of industry firsts and pioneering initiatives.
The award-winning project is a key initiative for building the clean energy system in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area: the Three Gorges Yangjiang Qingzhou VI 1000 MW Offshore Wind Farm Project, for which SIDRI undertook the EPC turnkey contract responsibility. The project involves the construction of 74 offshore wind turbines and one 330 kV AC offshore substation.
Bentley Solutions Applied in the Project
This project, characterized by its massive scale, faced three core challenges:
(1) High design complexity and tight scheduling in typhoon-prone waters off Guangdong with harsh marine conditions, making traditional design methods inadequate.
(2) Extremely high design and construction difficulty for the offshore substation platform, where the combined weight of the upper topside and lower jacket structure exceeds 10,000 tons.
(3) Significant challenges in ensuring structural safety and conducting long-term condition assessment of offshore wind facilities in a harsh marine environment, where traditional monitoring methods struggle to identify key characteristic states.
To address these challenges, SIDRI adopted Bentley’s digital technologies to build a full lifecycle digital solution covering design, construction, and operation and maintenance.
Forward Design and Collaborative Management
Established a forward design process for offshore wind power, utilizing SACS for structural simulation and design, and MicroStation and OpenBuildings for BIM model creation. Collaborative design was facilitated through the interconnected data environment of ProjectWise, creating digital assets for the design phase comprising 7,838 component models, 1,444 engineering objects, and 5,076 attribute data points.
Smart Construction Site and Construction Simulation
Using BIM models created during the design phase, SIDRI simulated construction methodologies such as the float-over installation of the offshore substation. It also integrated BIM with GIS technology to create a smart construction site system incorporating vessel AIS, personnel positioning, meteorological data, video surveillance, and electronic nautical chart functionalities to manage personnel, vessels, and project progress.
Digital Twin and Smart O&M
During the O&M phase, SIDRI created a digital twin of the wind farm using iTwin technology and developed a digital-twin-based structural health monitoring system. This system enables visualization, alerting, safety assessment, and early warning based on structural monitoring data. It leverages big data and AI algorithms to analyze structural performance and conduct safety predictions.
Bentley’s software enabled the seamless integration of multiple data sources and multi-disciplinary workflows while providing specialized offshore structural design tools and lightweight visualization technology. This helped overcome bottlenecks in simulation, precise construction, and intelligent O&M for a large-scale offshore wind project in typhoon-prone waters.
Key Achievements
Design efficiency increased by 25 percent.
Design cycle shortened by 15 percent.
Construction period reduced by 20 percent.
Project cost savings of 10 percent.
Annual operational costs reducible by 15 percent.
Safety assessment costs decreased by 30 percent.
Ensured the safety of over 4,000 construction personnel during peak periods.
The success of this project marks the leap of Bentley’s digital platform from tool application to systemic empowerment. By building a digital thread spanning the full lifecycle, Bentley’s technology system has transformed complex marine engineering into computable, simulatable, and predictable digital models, forging a core digital foundation for super-large offshore wind power projects.
Summary
This project successfully established a world-leading full lifecycle digital twin solution for offshore wind power. It achieved industry-recognized efficient delivery known as the “Three Gorges Speed,” and significantly improved design and construction efficiency through Bentley’s technology matrix. After commissioning, the project is expected to save 1.1 million tons of standard coal annually and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3 million tons. It provides a replicable and scalable engineering model for clean energy development in China’s coastal regions.
The pioneering value of this project lies in its real-time, perceivable, analyzable, and predictable digital twin of a physical offshore wind farm—representing a shift from experience-driven to data-and-intelligence-driven engineering. It offers a complete paradigm for efficient development, lean management, and smart operation of offshore wind projects, providing a “Three Gorges – SIDRI Solution” for China and the world.