Estimating the Offshore Wind Energy potential of the North Sea considering exclusion zones and the efficiency of large wind farms clusters

The European Union has set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, stimulating renewable energy production and accelerating the deployment of offshore wind energy in northern European waters, mainly the North Sea. We investigate if the set targets are achievable given the wind climate of the North Sea and efficiency loss resulting from large-scale extraction of kinetic energy.

We utilise the wind climate of the North Sea estimated from ERA5 and the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) to evaluate the offshore energy potential of this region. We consider three scenarios of wind turbine technologies: wind farms in operation today, existing plus wind farms in the construction and planning stage, and all wind farms, which include all possible areas where offshore wind farms could be built in the future, which are determined from current exclusions zones in the North Sea. We estimate the annual energy production and capacity factors per country for the various scenarios under free-stream conditions, considering wind farm wakes from engineering models and the loss of efficiency of huge wind farms. We study the sensitivity of the energy potential to the source of wind climate (ERA5 versus NEWA), whether the data is bias-corrected or not, and the method used to apply the wake losses to the wind farm considered. We also evaluate the possible year-to-year variability of these estimates.