This invention provides a production riser system that enables fluid communication in a deepwater drilling environment through the use of a variable buoyancy device supporting both a hybrid riser tower and an steel catenary riser system. Then, the method includes the step of computing an acceleration signal from the measured position error signal. A power estimator processes the signals from the microphones and the first beamformed signal from the first beamformer in order to generate, in frequency bands, a first statistical estimate of the energy of a first part of an incident sound field. The present invention therefore enables a single, standard sized disconnect to isolate and provide overload protection for two electrical load devices, thus reducing the required number of fused disconnects by one half.