The firm said the aim was to help insurers, facultative reinsurers, brokers, and risk managers better assess the natural catastrophe risk to industrial facilities and wind and solar energy installations throughout the world.

It added that its recent studies of renewable energy infrastructure reveal that the best approach to quantifying the catastrophe risk for such unique facilities is a site-specific engineering-based risk assessment.

“The in-depth knowledge gained from site-specific assessments has informed our research on the vulnerability of industrial and renewable energy facilities, which we have found to be acutely sensitive to site- and asset-specific characteristics,” said Dr. Akshay Gupta, principal engineer and director of the CRE practice at AIR Worldwide.

He added: “Based on our research findings, we believe that solutions typically used by the industry may not provide reliable estimates of the vulnerability for unique risks such as renewable energy infrastructure. Until such time as a majority of installation types are analyzed and understood, the best approach for assessing risk for such unique assets remains a site-specific risk assessment.”

AIR’s recent research reports on the seismic and wind vulnerability of modern wind turbines and solar arrays, the quantification of the catastrophe risk of renewable energy assets pose several interesting challenges.

“First, renewable energy structures and systems are relatively new, and, as a result, there is an acute scarcity of data — not only on their historical performance under extreme loading, but also on available detailed characteristics of the assets,” said Dr Gupta. “Second, renewable energy structures have completely distinct features from other typical industrial infrastructure, and therefore it may be inappropriate to use other industrial assets as surrogates for these systems.

“Additionally, the wind and solar energy industries continue to grow quickly throughout the world. The worldwide wind energy industry alone increased its capacity by more than 20 percent in 2010. Much of the growth is occurring in regions such as the United States and Asia, which have significant earthquake and tropical cyclone hazard, and Europe, which has significant earthquake and extra-tropical cyclone hazard. Consequently, a thorough understanding of renewable energy asset vulnerability is critical to managing and mitigating the risk associated with this rapid growth industry.”

It is this issue which AIR said had motivated the creation of a systematic engineering-based approach to assess the catastrophe risk associated with wind and solar energy installations on a site-specific basis.

“We believe that a rigorous understanding of the performance of wind turbines and solar arrays to natural catastrophes is essential to appropriately address issues of risk management and financing associated with such projects,” continued Dr. Gupta. “With this in mind, AIR conducts detailed engineering analyses for assets with unique risk characteristics to evaluate their behavior under severe ground shaking and winds.

“The results show that the performance or damageability of such systems is highly sensitive to a multitude of site- and asset-specific details that make quantification of the risk difficult using broadly categorized approaches typically found in risk models.”