North Sea offshore techno-economic wind potential incorporating regional atmospheric energy budgets

Europe’s strategy to decarbonize the energy sector in accordance with climate mitigation goals requires a high penetration of variable renewable energy sources, particularly offshore wind energy. As capacity is projected to expand significantly over the coming decades, the kinetic energy depletion from the atmosphere by large-scale wind farms cannot be ignored. Despite their implications, these regional-scale effects are typically underrepresented in the literature compared to intra-farm wake effects, which are successfully mitigated through adequate turbine spacing. In this study, we employ the ETHOS.REFLOW renewable energy potential workflow manager to evaluate the technical potential of the North Sea’s offshore wind resources in a fully reproducible manner. A comprehensive ocean eligibility assessment is conducted to assess the available areas for deployment, followed by explicit placement of individual turbines over the remaining areas. To assess the relationship between deployment density and efficiency losses, we model three distinct deployment scenarios for each sea region. Our approach involves an analysis of two major reanalysis-based meteorological time series datasets corrected for bias using observational wind data. We expand on a previously defined simple physics-based regional energy budget model accounting for the horizontal and vertical influx of kinetic energy and energy losses from conversion to electrical energy, surface friction, wakes and downward outflux, modelling the total power yield and reduction factors at a national level. Finally, we employ a cost model to calculate the levelized cost of energy for wind farms at a national level and compare the results for multiple scenarios, both with and without accounting for atmospheric kinetic energy removal. Our findings indicate a decline in cost-efficiency at large deployment scales related to efficiency losses as a result of atmospheric kinetic energy extraction. These findings are highly informative for energy system planners and policymakers given Europe’s planned intensification of its offshore wind sector over the next decade.