Production and Cost Assessment of Offshore Wind Power in the North Sea

J N Sørensen,A Cazin-Bourguignon,G C Larsen

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1934/1/012019

Abstract

A minimalistic model complex for determining the available wind power and associated costs related to the development of large–scale offshore wind power was recently developed by Sørensen and Larsen [1]. The model complex demands only a few global input parameters, such as turbine rotor diameter, nameplate capacity, area of wind farm, number of turbines, water depth, and mean wind speed Weibull parameters for the site. Using actual wind climate and bathymetric data for the North Sea, the model is in the present work used to map the annual energy production and levelized cost of energy (LCoE) for wind farms located in the North Sea. As a main conclusion, exploiting all locations with water depths down to about 45 m comply with the electrical power demand of Europe, which is about 3500 TWh/year. In this case, the LCoE is found to be about 7 ∈cents/kWh for wind farms consisting of 15 MW wind turbines and an interspacing between the wind turbines of 8 diameter, corresponding to 2 km.

Highlights

Offshore wind energy has grown significantly over the past years, it presently only contributes with about 3% of the total deployed wind energy
The study combines a simple meteorological model for large wind farms, with the wind farm flow field being in equilibrium with the ambient atmospheric boundary layer, with an economic analysis including the bathymetry of the North Sea
The main parameters of the model are wind turbine size, interspatial distance between the turbines as well as wind resources and water depths conditioned on specific locations within the North Sea

Summary

Introduction

Offshore wind energy has grown significantly over the past years, it presently only contributes with about 3% of the total deployed wind energy. 4.5 Mapping of Levelized Cost of Energy Using the model described above, with input data from the mapped distributions of Weibull parameters and bathymetric data, the LCoE for locations of a ‘sample’ wind farm size of 100 turbines have been computed.

Results

Conclusion