Presentations

Abstract

The Esbjerg and Ostend declarations, supported by North Seas Energy Cooperation countries and the UK, have established ambitious offshore wind expansion targets for the North Sea. These targets aim to increase combined offshore wind capacity to 120 GW by 2030 and 300 GW by 2050. This unprecedented development strategy creates a complex landscape where the rapidly increasing density of offshore wind parks raises critical concerns about potential wind resource competition and farm-to-farm interactions across Exclusive Economic Zones. This study presents detailed development scenario analyses for the North Sea basin through 2050, beginning with a comprehensive inventory of existing, planned, and proposed wind farm sites. Three key temporal horizons­­— 2030, 2040, and 2050—are established, with three scenario levels—low, expected, and high—per decade. To ensure realistic future wind farm modelling, offshore technologies trends are considered both for fixed-bottom and floating wind turbines. State-of-the-art wind resource modelling simulations are then coupled with established engineering wind farm models to characterize and estimate the expected energy production across the developed scenarios including wake losses caused by the farm itself, neighboring and planned wind farms. Accurate wind power simulations require high-fidelity modelling of spatially and temporally correlated wind inflow conditions across the North Sea, whose multi-scale nature poses additional challenges to properly capture the relevant inflow features. The approach leverages a meso-to-microscale methodology to model the wind resource at the North Sea. ERA5 reanalysis data are initially downscaled to 3-km and 1-hour resolution using the WRF numerical weather prediction model in combination with a dedicated deep learning algorithm. Microscale downscaling to 10-m spatial resolution then incorporates wind-driven sea surface roughness effects. With this approach, twenty years of inflow conditions—including air density and turbulence intensity—are computed for each scenario, and representative ambient conditions are assumed using a typical meteorological year approach at each of the identified calculation clusters. The wind farm model additionally includes both electrical and availability losses to attain realistic production profiles and capacity factors. To quantify the impact of wake losses, fast engineering wake models are validated using SCADA data from an operational wind farm in the Belgian Eastern Zone. The best performing model is then combined with the yearly representative time series to properly capture the effect of both intra- and farm-to-farm wake deficit impinging on each turbine. Wind farms’ power production profiles are then computed by combining the simulated waked conditions with the selected turbine power curves. The simulations are validated with actual power production data from ENTSOE-e. This methodology is applied to the established development scenarios and provides a comprehensive analysis in terms of cumulative yearly power production and wind farm capacity factors per Economic Exclusive Zone. The study addresses the potential challenges of wind resource competition between neighboring farms and across maritime boundaries, offering essential guidance for future offshore wind development planning in the North Sea. Additionally, it provides valuable insights into grid requirements needed to integrate the future offshore wind capacity, serving as basis to investigate the potential of superconducting cable systems deployment.