Posters

Abstract

The Crown Estate (TCE) is responsible for the management of the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland for the benefit of the nation. Within its Marine Delivery Routemap [1], TCE is working to catalyse the UK towards a net zero and energy secure future, deliver a thriving marine environment and promote nature recovery, and optimise value from the marine space across sectors for the economy and communities. This means accurately assessing potential future offshore wind (OSW) development scenarios so that comparisons can be drawn with potential alternative seabed uses in terms of contribution to the energy mix, potential impacts on marine ecosystems and costs. In support of these goals, TCE has been developing a suite of digital tools including physics-based, bottom-up techno-economic models and a sector-agnostic deployment optimisation tool that considers costs and constraints. The objective of these tools is to support marine spatial planners as they allocate areas of seabed by allowing fast evaluation and comparison of potentially hundreds or thousands of viable scenarios. Recent industry research into wake propagation offshore from gigawatt-scale wind farms and wind farm clusters has come at a time when the UK, like many European countries, is targeting significant continued growth in OSW deployment over the coming years. Inter-array wake effects and their impact on existing and potential future OSW developments are therefore a key concern within TCE’s modelling but the national scale of TCE’s planning and optimisation work presents particular challenges that require novel approaches: * The scale of analysis is large both numerically and spatially, as a large number of turbines must be represented and effects considered at the national scale, as well as allowing for thousands of such scenarios to be evaluated in reasonable time. * Consideration of wakes losses within the broader techno-economic and deployment modelling context is required – increased wake interactions between some proposed allocations may still represent the optimal development path to meet deployment targets when all other factors are considered. * The wake modelling approach must still achieve a sufficient level of accuracy that TCE and the industry have confidence that the proposed lease allocations represent an optimal scenario. In this session, we will discuss these challenges and how they are currently being addressed. Specifically, we will present a two-step process for the consideration of national scale inter-array wakes in the context of marine spatial planning. Initially, an extremely fast wakes-proxy model is used to rapidly assess thousands of potential allocations within only seconds of elapsed time. This model provides a simplistic view of wakes but quickly eliminates allocations which, when wakes are considered, are likely to fall below a target Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE). With the number of potential allocations to consider reduced, standard engineering wake models become more feasible and provide a more accurate assessment of probable wake impact. However, running thousands of turbines in a single engineering wake model is still computationally impractical. To address this, a novel method for the segmentation of national scale wakes models and results will be presented. [1] https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/our-business/marine/Marine-Delivery-Routemap