Assessing the impact of offshore wind siting strategies on the design of the European power system

David Radu,Mathias Berger,Antoine Dubois,Raphaël Fonteneau,Hrvoje Pandžić,Yury Dvorkin,Quentin Louveaux,Damien Ernst

doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.117700

David Radu, Mathias Berger + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.117700

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Abstract

This paper provides a detailed account of the impact of different offshore wind siting strategies on the design of the European power system. To this end, a two-stage method is proposed. In the first stage, a highly-granular siting problem identifies a suitable set of sites where offshore wind plants could be deployed according to a pre-specified criterion. Two siting schemes are analysed and compared within a realistic case study. These schemes essentially select a pre-specified number of sites so as to maximize their aggregate power output and their spatiotemporal complementarity, respectively. In addition, two variants of these siting schemes are provided, wherein the number of sites to be selected is specified on a country-by-country basis rather than Europe-wide. In the second stage, the subset of previously-identified sites is passed to a capacity expansion planning framework that sizes the power generation, transmission and storage assets that should be deployed and operated in order to satisfy pre-specified electricity demand levels at minimum cost. Results show that the complementarity-based siting criterion leads to system designs which are up to 5% cheaper than the ones relying on the power output-based scheme when offshore wind plants are deployed with no consideration for country-based deployment targets. On the contrary, the power output-based scheme leads to system designs which are consistently 2% cheaper than the ones leveraging the complementarity-based siting strategy when such constraints are enforced. The robustness of the reported results is supported by a sensitivity analysis on offshore wind capital expenditure and inter-annual weather variability, respectively.

Highlights

The large-scale deployment of technologies harnessing renewable energy sources (RES) for electricity production has been a mainstay of climate and decarbonization policies
The framework sizes gas-fired power plants, offshore wind power plants, battery storage and electricity transmission assets and operates the system so as to supply electricity demand levels consistent with current European electricity consumption at minimum cost while reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector by 90% compared with 1990 levels and taking a broad range of legacy assets into account
An unpartitioned set-up is used, whose outcome can be seen in Fig. 2 for both P ROD and complementarity that sites exhibit (COMP) schemes, where green markers depict the 135 legacy offshore wind sites common across the two strategies

Summary

Introduction

The large-scale deployment of technologies harnessing renewable energy sources (RES) for electricity production has been a mainstay of climate and decarbonization policies. In Europe, solar photovoltaic and onshore wind power plants have formed the bulk of new renewable capacity additions for over a decade [1]. In spite of the need for extra capacity deployments required to achieve ambitious decarbonization targets [2], the pace at which these technologies are being deployed in a number of countries has remained sluggish of late [1], often as a result of social acceptance issues [3] and the phasing out of renewable support schemes. Offshore wind power plants are located in unpopulated areas and are less subject to social acceptance issues than onshore ones. The largescale deployment of offshore wind power plants has increasingly been viewed as a key enabler of European decarbonization efforts [6,7]

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