On the Necessity of Technology Qualification in the Offshore Wind Energy Industry

Author(s):  
S. M. S. M. K. Samarakoon ◽  
O. T. Gudmestad

Wind farm technology can be considered as one of the best available techniques to deliver renewable energy. Similarly, the number of wind farms has been growing rapidly owing to their contribution to sustainable development. Recently also, there has been a growing awareness of the need to develop a plentiful number of wind farms offshore rather than onshore. This is due to the consideration that the offshore wind farms are more beneficial than onshore with respect to their exposure to higher wind speeds while covering extensive areas. Less turbulence offshore also allows the turbines to harvest the available energy more effectively than onshore and to reduce the fatigue on turbines. Furthermore, most of the offshore wind farms are located in remote areas, which helps to avoid noise effects and the visual burden (shadows) on society. However, the malfunctioning of the turbines in offshore wind farms after a few months or years from their commissioning is a one of the challenging issue. The outcome of the failures leads to large financial losses owing to cost-intensive repairs and weather-related delays. Therefore, identification of potential failures at the early stages of development through a technology qualification procedure will help to minimize the loss of financial resources by increasing the reliability of the systems and the availability of wind power. Basically, appraisal of risk and reliability aspects is playing a key role in this qualification process in order to confirm that the system will perform as intended. This study identifies some recent historical failures in offshore wind farms causing significant financial losses. Further, it discusses the reasons of the failures and the possibility to overcome future obstacles in developing offshore wind farms using a technology qualification procedure. Finally, this paper discusses whether the existing technology qualification procedure can be directly applied for offshore wind farms, and what important modifications are necessary.

2019 ◽  
Vol 137 ◽  
pp. 01049
Author(s):  
Anna Sobotka ◽  
Kajetan Chmielewski ◽  
Marcin Rowicki ◽  
Justyna Dudzińska ◽  
Przemysław Janiak ◽  
...  

Poland is currently at the beginning of the energy transformation. Nowadays, most of the electricity generated in Poland comes from coal combustion. However, in accordance to the European Union policy of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, there are already plans to switch to low-emission energy sources in Poland, one of which are offshore wind farms. The article presents the current regulatory environment of the offshore wind energy in Poland, along with a reference to Polish and European decarbonisation plans. In the further part of the article, the methods of determining the kinetic energy of wind and the power curve of a wind turbine are discussed. Then, on the basis of historical data of wind speeds collected in the area of the Baltic Sea, calculations are carried out leading to obtain statistical distributions of power that could be generated by an exemplary wind farm with a power capacity of 400 MW, located at the place of wind measurements. On their basis, statistical differences in the wind power generation between years, months of the year and hours of the day are analysed.


Author(s):  
John Glasson

The Offshore Wind sector is a major, dynamic, and rapidly evolving renewable energy industry. This is particularly so in Europe, and especially in the UK. Associated with the growth of the industry has been a growth of interest in community benefits as voluntary measures provided by a developer to the host community. However, in many cases, and for some of the large North Sea distant offshore wind farms, the benefits packages have been disparate and pro rata much smaller than for the well-established onshore wind farm industry. However, there are signs of change. This paper explores the issues of community benefits for the UK offshore sector and evolving practice, as reflected in a macro study of the adoption of community benefits approaches across the industry. This is followed by a more in-depth micro- approach, which explores approaches that have been adopted in three case studies of recent OWF projects — Aberdeen, Beatrice and the Hornsea Array. Whilst there is still much divergence in practice, there are also examples of some convergence, and the development of a more replicable practice. Particularly notable is the adoption of annual community benefits funds, as the key element of community benefits schemes/agreements between developers, local authorities and local communities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 129-139
Author(s):  
Tanvi Gupta ◽  
Somnath Baidya Roy

Abstract. With the rapid growth in offshore wind energy, it is important to understand the dynamics of offshore wind farms. Most of the offshore wind farms are currently installed in coastal regions where they are often affected by sea-breezes. In this work, we quantitatively study the recovery processes for coastal wind farms under sea-breeze conditions. We use a modified Borne's method to identify sea breeze days off the west coast of India in the Arabian Sea. For the identified sea breeze days, we simulate a hypothetical wind farm covering 50×50 km2 area using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model driven by realistic initial and boundary conditions. We use three wind farm layouts with the turbines spaced 0.5, 1, and 2 km apart. The results show an interesting power generation pattern with a peak at the upwind edge and another peak at the downwind edge due to sea breeze. Wind farms affect the circulation patterns, but the effects of these modifications are very weak compared to the sea breezes. Vertical recovery is the dominant factor with more than half of the momentum extracted by wind turbines being replenished by vertical turbulent mixing. However, horizontal recovery can also play a strong role for sparsely packed wind farms. Horizontal recovery is stronger at the edges where the wind speeds are higher whereas vertical recovery is stronger in the interior of the wind farms. This is one of the first studies to examine replenishment processes in offshore wind farms under sea breeze conditions. It can play an important role in advancing our understanding wind farm-atmospheric boundary layer interactions.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Hill ◽  
K. R. W. Bell ◽  
D. McMillan ◽  
D. Infield

Abstract. The growth of wind power production in the electricity portfolio is striving to meet ambitious targets set, for example by the EU, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020. Huge investments are now being made in new offshore wind farms around UK coastal waters that will have a major impact on the GB electrical supply. Representations of the UK wind field in syntheses which capture the inherent structure and correlations between different locations including offshore sites are required. Here, Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) models are presented and extended in a novel way to incorporate offshore time series from a pan-European meteorological model called COSMO, with onshore wind speeds from the MIDAS dataset provided by the British Atmospheric Data Centre. Forecasting ability onshore is shown to be improved with the inclusion of the offshore sites with improvements of up to 25% in RMS error at 6 h ahead. In addition, the VAR model is used to synthesise time series of wind at each offshore site, which are then used to estimate wind farm capacity factors at the sites in question. These are then compared with estimates of capacity factors derived from the work of Hawkins et al. (2011). A good degree of agreement is established indicating that this synthesis tool should be useful in power system impact studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 184 ◽  
pp. 01094
Author(s):  
C Lavanya ◽  
Nandyala Darga Kumar

Wind energy is the renewable sources of energy and it is used to generate electricity. The wind farms can be constructed on land and offshore where higher wind speeds are prevailing. Most offshore wind farms employ fixed-foundation wind turbines in relatively shallow water. In deep waters floating wind turbines have gained popularity and are recent development. This paper discusses the various types of foundations which are in practice for use in wind turbine towers installed on land and offshore. The applicability of foundations based on depth of seabed and distance of wind farm from the shore are discussed. Also, discussed the improvement methods of weak or soft soils for the foundations of wind turbine towers.


Author(s):  
Mohammed A. Badr ◽  
Ahmed M. Atallah ◽  
Mona A. Bayoumi

<p>With the increase in the development of offshore wind farm (OWF) around the world, this paper describes OWF consisting of permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) wind turbines connected to Active network (AC grid) and Passive network (loads) through Multi Terminal High voltage direct current(MT-HVDC) transmission system. This paper discusses the effect of using a Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) unit in a hybrid power system that contains OWF. In this paper, we have aggregated 300 wind turbines of 1.5 MW PMSG using an aggregation technique (multi full aggregated model using equivalent wind speed (MFAM_EWS)). Furthermore, we have used a detector to detect any tripping of any wind turbine and substitute the shortage of power due to this loss of wind turbines immediately through SMES. The Active network in this paper should have a minimum of 150 MW power to be supplied by controlling the SMES unit (absorbing or providing power according to the system requirement). Simulation has been carried out by MATLAB/Simulink program to test the effectiveness of the SMES unit during tripping some of the wind turbines, fluctuation in wind speeds, load change and voltage dips. </p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 890-900
Author(s):  
Elizabeth T Methratta

Abstract Offshore wind farms often co-occur with biodiverse marine ecosystems with high ecological, economic, and cultural value. Yet there are many uncertainties about how wind farms affect marine organisms and their environment. The before–after–control–impact (BACI) design, an approach that compares an impact location with an unaffected control both before and after the intervention, is the most common method used to study how offshore wind farms affect finfish. Unfortunately, this design has several methodological limitations that undermine its ability to detect effects in these studies. An alternative approach, the before–after-gradient (BAG) design, would sample along a gradient with increasing distance from the turbines both before and after the intervention, and could overcome many of the limitations of BACI. The BAG design would eliminate the difficult task of finding a suitable control, allow for the assessment of the spatial scale and extent of wind farm effects, and improve statistical power by incorporating distance as an independent variable in analytical models rather than relegating it to the error term. This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of the BACI and BAG designs in the context of offshore wind development and suggests an approach to incorporating the BAG design into existing fisheries surveys and a regional monitoring framework.


2011 ◽  
Vol 383-390 ◽  
pp. 3610-3616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Yin Zhang ◽  
Zai Jun Wu ◽  
Si Peng Hao ◽  
Ke Xu

Offshore wind farm is developed in the ascendant currently. The reliable operation, power loss, investment cost and performance of wind farms were effect by the integration solutions of electrical interconnection system directly. Several new integration configurations based on VSC-HVDC were comparative analyzed. For the new HVDC topology applied the wind farm internal DC bus, the Variable Speed DC (VSDC) system that is suitable for those topologies was proposed. The structure of VSDC was discussed and maximum wind power tracking was simulated on the minimal system. It is clear that new integration configurations based on VSC-HVDC has good prospects.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Nivet ◽  
Ema Muk-Pavic

Offshore wind energy is one of the most upcoming sources of energy, and it is already partially replacing the fossil fuelled power production. However, offshore wind turbine technology is also associated with harsher weather environment. Indeed, it experiences more challenging wind and wave conditions, which in turn limits the vessels capabilities to access the wind farms. Additionally, with the constant rise of power utilization, improvements in the Operation Maintenance (O&M) planning are crucial for the development of large isolated offshore wind farms. Improvements in the planning of the O&M for offshore wind farms could lead to considerable reduction in costs. For this reason, the interest of this research paper is the investigation of the most cost effective approach to offshore turbine maintenance strategies. This objective is achieved by implementing a simulation approach that includes a climate conditions analysis, an operation analysis, a failure evaluation and a simulation of the repairs. This paper points out how different O&M strategies can influence the sustainability of a wind farm.


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