Economic performance of an overplanted offshore wind farm under several commitment strategies and dynamic thermal ratings of submarine export cable

Abstract

The overplanting of an offshore wind farm (OWF) with dynamic thermal ratings (DTR) is a promising solution for enhancing OWF performance. As the overplanted OWF generates an additional energy and DTR ensures its better transfer, the research question is if final OWF profits would be higher than associated costs. While there has been growing attention on this subject in recent years, there is still no research investigating the commitment strategies of overplanted OWFs with DTR. This paper investigates how commitment strategies may affect the economic performance of an overplanted OWF with DTR. The results show that, depending on the day-ahead commitment strategy, the annual revenue of OWFs may theoretically increase by up to 21% even without overplanting nor DTR, and by up to 204 % with overplanting and DTR. However, although commitment strategies, overplanting and DTR may significantly increase annual revenues of an OWF, its net present value (NPV) still heavily depends on market prices. In the presence of low market prices as in 2018, overplanting actually reduces the NPV of an OWF and, under the conditions considered here, keeps its NPV always negative. On the contrary, in the presence of high market prices as in 2022 or feed-in tariffs, the overplanting increases the OWF NPV. In the latter case, the NPV of the overplanted OWF is estimated between 1.5 billion and 9.5 billion euros while the discounted payback period is 3–12 years. The economic benefits of DTR for the overplanted OWF are estimated between 0.7 and 1 billion euros. The paper also shows that the optimal overplanting rate is very different whether the NPV or LCOE are considered. Finally, the paper shows that committing to the actual OWF power production (i.e. assuming a perfect power forecast) does not necessarily result in the highest revenue.