Insurance is one of the biggest OPEX items in wind power plant budgets, yet it's the most underdiscussed subject. Arguably, this is because many industry stakeholders view insurance as a "it is what it is" phenomenon, creating inertia that prevents them from allocating their already limited resources to pursuing change.
This situation reveals itself in the industry's general opinions. A common narrative suggests that asset owners tend to become self-restrained in their relationship with insurance companies, probably due to the misperceived view that the more data they share with their insurer, the more penalised they may be due to revealed risks.
Our recent WindEurope 2025 side event, co-hosted with Link Broker, Better insurance with operational data and AI, exposed a different reality: diligent asset owners are not only willing but also eager to share data with insurers to foster better, more collaborative relationships.
The Real Data Sharing Landscape
Our event convened an impressive group of industry stakeholders, including investors managing a combined fleet of 10 GW, as well as underwriters, loss adjusters and brokers. Speakers included Tomasz Nowosielski from Burgenland Energie, Giacomo Eufemi from Nadara, Charlie Plumley from Nuveen Infrastructure, Hakan Ileri from Addvalora Global and Sam Millard from RiskPoint Group. Their collective insight revealed a landscape markedly different from the aforementioned biases.
Asset owners who invest in proper maintenance and advanced technologies, such as predictive maintenance, are often frustrated that their diligence goes unrewarded in insurance terms and conditions. These owners, who have nothing to hide, are enthusiastic about sharing operational data that demonstrates their commitment to asset care.
Although some insurance stakeholders we've collected feedback from suggest otherwise, particularly for pre-policy processes, our findings don't explicitly indicate that asset owners' willingness to share data excludes pre-policy stages (i.e., risk surveys that affect underwriters' pricing decisions).
Key Use Cases for Operational Data and AI in Insurance
The discussions during the event, along with post-event follow-up conversations, highlighted several critical applications where operational data adds immediate value:
Claims Management Streamlining:
Data-driven approaches to claims processing, particularly for calculating business interruption losses, can significantly reduce settlement times and improve accuracy. Current methods often rely on manual processing and subjective assessments, creating friction between insurers, asset owners and loss adjusters.
In-policy Preventive Risk Control:
Leveraging predictive analytics to identify failure risks weeks or months in advance helps insured clients prevent potential losses, allowing them to proactively address risks and reduce claim frequency and severity.
Objective Risk Assessment:
The industry currently suffers from subjectivity in risk evaluation. Insurance companies lack standardised, objective, and, more importantly, scalable methods to differentiate between outperforming well-maintained assets and mediocre or problematic ones. Moreover, as wind assets increasingly integrate with solar and battery storage, risk quantification becomes exponentially more complex. This creates a market inefficiency where diligent operators effectively subsidise higher-risk ones through their premiums.
The Emerging Alignment
Our event revealed a promising alignment: asset owners want to share data and insurers never object to getting this data in principle (though, see the caveats below). This mutual interest creates potential for a win-win scenario where both sides benefit from fast-paced processes, increased transparency and more precise risk assessment.
What’s Stopping Us?
If sharing data isn't the core problem, what is? We observe two fundamental concerns:
- Lack of trust: Insurers do not trust the data provided by asset owners. Conversely, asset owners have little confidence that the data they share won’t be used against them.
- Scalability: Insurers lack the technological infrastructure and wind-specific expertise to effectively manage the vast amount of data that can be made available to them.
Better Wind Energy Insurance Is Possible
The good news is that all the necessary ingredients are available to overcome these barriers, and not surprisingly, data lies at the core of the solution:
- Auditable systems that extract data in an automated fashion (as opposed to manually handled spreadsheets) provide the transparency that insurance companies need.
- Validated solutions that transform the large amounts of data into usable nuggets of information for insurance purposes enable evaluation of individual plants in a scalable manner.
- With systems in place for individualised evaluation and streamlined processes reducing costs, insurers can offer better deals to diligent asset owners who share their data.
The wind energy industry stands at an inflection point in its relationship with insurance. The old paradigm of limited data sharing and subjective assessment is giving way to a more collaborative, transparent approach.
For asset owners, this transition presents the opportunity to secure insurance terms that accurately reflect their operational excellence. For insurers, it promises a lower cost of risk and leaner operations.
At Kavaken, we're working to bridge this gap by developing systems that turn operational data into value for both asset owners and insurers, at scale. As all parties agree, wind energy insurance must be built on data, not assumptions. The question is no longer whether this transformation will happen, but which organisations will lead it.
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