The BeFORECAST project – wind power forecasting for the Belgian offshore wind farms

The BeFORECAST project (2022 – 2025) is a research project on wind power forecasting for Belgian offshore wind farms funded by the Energy Transition Funds of the Federal Public Service Economy, SMEs, Middle Classes, and Energy of the Belgian Federal government. The project is coordinated by the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, with consortium members from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMI), KU Leuven, 3E, and SABCA.

Today, offshore wind energy provides over 10% of the annual electricity consumption in Belgium. The Belgian offshore wind farms have a total capacity of 2.2 GW and, due to the limited area of the Belgian part of the North Sea, these farms feature a capacity density of well over 10 MW/km², which is among the largest of currently operational wind farms globally. In view of ambitions to accelerate the energy transition, Belgian offshore wind capacity will be nearly tripled to almost 6 GW by 2030. As such, the Belgian electricity system will be increasingly characterized by a large penetration of intermittent offshore renewables in which wake interactions between wind turbines play an important role. Therefore, accurate modeling and forecasting of wind farm flows and power extraction is crucial for an efficient and reliable energy system in Belgium.

The overall BeFORECAST project goal is to improve wind power forecasting and flow reconstruction by leveraging offshore measurement campaigns, numerical weather prediction, high-fidelity turbulence-resolving flow simulations, and machine learning techniques. The current contribution highlights the main outcomes of the project as it approaches its closing, including the implementation and testing of a wind farm parameterization in the RMI weather models, offshore measurement campaigns with lidars and drones, flow reconstruction in large-eddy simulations from lidars using 4D-Var techniques, nowcasting of wind ramps and storm events at farm level, and inter-farm wake effects of the upcoming wind farm developments in Belgium.