The Carbon Trust has announced today that it will launch a new North Sea challenge to improve current offshore wind resource models.
It’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) will look to encourage industry and academic applicants to help to progress the sector to improve technology and provide more accurate offshore wind energy yield predictions.
The competition is being led by CENER and managed by the Carbon Trust with funding from the OWA partners – the Scottish Government, EnBW, E.ON, Iberdrola, Innogy, Orsted, Shell, SSE, Equinor, and Vattenfall.
The Carbon Trust claim different validation datasets will be taken from operational North Sea wind farms, which will “span a wide range of wind conditions related to wind farm topology and wind climate characteristics”.
As the wind farms will be part of a “blind test”, the Carbon Trust said it could not reveal which will be used at this stage.
Liam Leahy, offshore wind manager at the Carbon Trust and programme manager for the OWA’s wakes and wind resource technical working group, said: “The continued improvement in wake modelling for the offshore wind industry has been a key theme under the OWA programme, and the value of assessing modelling against actual operational data is one of the most valuable exercises we can do as a group to support the offshore wind industry.
“Bringing together competition participants to allow them to assess their wake models will only improve the process in predicting energy estimates from offshore wind farms.”
For further information, please contact the Carbon Trust press office on +44 (0)20 7170 7050 or email press@carbontrust.com.
