Posters

Abstract

The current wind energy development targets set in many countries as part of their energy transition goals are demanding fast and efficient mechanisms, procedures and tools to help the wind and energy sectors respond to the demand for future projects. The work described in this paper is in the context of accelerating the planning and development of offshore wind energy. A new methodology for prefeasibility studies for offshore wind projects is presented. Its main features are a) global coverage, b) fast and inexpensive, c) precise estimates of total installed capacity and capacity factor, d) indicates key issues for the success. The process starts by choosing an area of interest. The wind resources as well as the orography and roughness of the land masses nearby the area of interest are obtained from the Global Wind Atlas (GWA), a free web-based tool developed and maintained by the Technical University of Denmark. The GWA has global coverage, therefore due to the availability of information for modelling a wind farm anywhere in the world, this methodology can be used for both mature and new markets. In the next step, and considering a maritime spatial plan unavailable, an assessment of publicly available geospatial data within the area of interest in combination with the wind resource data from the GWA is performed using a GIS software. The result is the identification of the available zones and the main constraints for an offshore wind power project. Then, a wind farm layout is generated using WAsP - the industry-standard software for wind resource assessment, siting and energy yield calculations for wind turbines and wind farms - where wind climate data for each wind turbine position are downloaded from the GWA, and then the potential annual energy production for the wind farm is calculated considering internal and external (if neighbour projects exist) wake effects. This last step is concluded with the calculation of the net AEP by discounting the usual technical and non-technical losses for an offshore wind project, including the potential large-scale wind farm cluster wakes and interactions. A highlight of this method is that the GIS high-resolution definition of the project area and the simulation of close-to-optimum layouts give excellent estimations for the total installed capacity and the capacity factor for a preliminary analysis. In addition, considering that this method includes detailed wind farm modelling and all steps of a standard energy assessment, except for the use of local measurements, an uncertainty analysis can be included for areas of the world where the wind climate information provided by the GWA has been validated using local high-quality wind measurements. Reasonably good quality information for preliminary discussions on grid connection options, potential environmental and social impacts, wake interferences from/to neighbour projects, etc., can also be derived from the analysis, which might be useful for addressing the key issues for the success of a new project.