Production and Cost Assessment of Offshore Wind Power in the North Sea

A minimalistic model complex for determining the available wind power and associated costs related to the development of large–scale offshore wind power was recently developed by Sørensen and Larsen [1]. The model complex demands only a few global input parameters, such as turbine rotor diameter, nameplate capacity, area of wind farm, number of turbines, water depth, and mean wind speed Weibull parameters for the site. Using actual wind climate and bathymetric data for the North Sea, the model is in the present work used to map the annual energy production and levelized cost of energy (LCoE) for wind farms located in the North Sea. As a main conclusion, exploiting all locations with water depths down to about 45 m comply with the electrical power demand of Europe, which is about 3500 TWh/year. In this case, the LCoE is found to be about 7 ∈cents/kWh for wind farms consisting of 15 MW wind turbines and an interspacing between the wind turbines of 8 diameter, corresponding to 2 km.