Onshore & Offshore Wind Energy Information

In a nutshell

Wind power is an important source of renewable energy and the exploitation of both on-and offshore wind energy is expected to grow in the coming years.

To take full advantage of the wind power and efficiently it is essential to guarantee reliability and security of the electricity system.

This Use Case helps to develop wind and weather forecast models to estimate future wind turbine resources and their vulnerability and provide an accurate energy yield prediction.

Technical Overview

Use Case Topic: Energy

Scale of the Use Case: Global

Policy addressed: Energy policy

Providers: CSC-IT Center for Science

Challenge

The shifts of climate change in weather patterns can make it difficult to anticipate the potential of power generation. With an expected growth of both on-and offshore wind energy usage and the need to guarantee efficient interconnection between the farms, a more refined technological infrastructure is needed to ensure the stability and reliability of the electricity system.

Visual of global map at a horizontal resolution of 5 km and 1-hourly frequency for 20/01/2020. This DestinE use case aims at providing onshore and offshore wind energy information. — Global map at a horizontal resolution of 5 km and 1-hourly frequency for 20/01/2020. It shows the capacity factor for a class S wind turbine (Vestas V164 – 9.5 MW). Data was obtained from the IFS-FESOM model. Credit: BSC

DestinE Solution

This use case demonstrates the value of the Climate DT for informing the investment strategies of the wind power sector, focusing on offshore wind farms.

The Energy Onshore, and Energy Offshore applications are being developed in parallel providing information on key global indicators relevant to the wind farm industry at various temporal and spatial scales. Both applications are able to work independently but share parts of the code and several functionalities.

The Onshore application focuses on energy-related indicators, such as wind speed anomalies, power density, capacity factors, annual energy production and the interannual variability of these metrics, among others.

The Offshore application produces specific estimates of relevant parameters for offshore wind farms in areas subject to seasonal ice, such as icing due to sea spray, and others relevant to the construction and maintenance, including sea ice, ice-related stress to the structures and expected navigability.

Regional map over the North Sea at a horizontal resolution of 5 km and 1-hourly frequency for 20/01/2020. It shows the capacity factor for a class S wind turbine (Vestas V164 – 9.5 MW). The black small dots over the map represent existing offshore and onshore wind farms in the region. The black dashed contour line marks where the wind is too low for the wind turbine to function. Data was obtained from the IFS-FESOM model. Credit: BSC

Impact

The applications provides estimates of future wind turbine resources and wind turbine vulnerability, including 10-minute wind speed distribution with its changes at the multi-decadal scale to help improve wind farm design. Another key aspect of the application is to evaluate how electricity demand will change in future climate scenarios.