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Cables ‘overlooked’ in early offshore wind cost projections

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  • Cable failures and electrical losses can have a significant impact on long-term profitability – but cables are often neglected by developers, who traditionally optimise their wind farm layouts based on high CAPEX components like turbines and foundations.
  • Youwind launches unique cable visualisation functionality, helping developers quickly simulate the impact of cable failures and losses on future maintenance budgets and build crucial redundancy into their wind farm layouts.

Barcelona, 20th February 2024 — Faced with an ongoing trend of financial challenges linked to the installation and operation of subsea cables, offshore wind developers must start optimising their cable layouts at the earliest possible opportunity during the screening and development phases. This is the perspective of Youwind Renewables, a unique web-based solution for accelerating offshore wind development.

Youwind has today, therefore, unveiled new cable visualisation functionality within its Pixel Park layout generation and micrositing tool. This will enable developers to quickly generate optimised inter-array and export cable layouts, simulate the impact of losses on future maintenance budgets, and build redundancy into wind farm designs.

Inter-array and export cables are widely acknowledged to be the most prominent point of failure for offshore wind farms in construction and operation – often contributing to significant unforeseen repair and replacement costs, alongside considerable loss of revenue when the ability of the wind farm to export power is affected.

Youwind’s data show that, for European wind farms, the failure probability is 0.0007 per kilometer of cable per year (Source: TenneT) – a figure that may seem small at face value but represents a significant threat to the profitability of any project without suitable redundancy measures in place.

Offshore wind must accelerate early development phases to support busiest year to date – Youwind

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  • Following a challenging 2023, the period 2024 – 2030 will see the greatest number of offshore wind auctions and seabed lease programs to date.
  • But, with developers facing the potential for up to 50GW in offshore wind awarded in the next two years in Europe alone, the pace of early-stage site interrogation and screening must significantly increase if Governments are to hit Net Zero commitments.

Barcelona, 30th January 2024 — With European offshore wind leasing rounds potentially set to award over 80GW in new projects by 2029, offshore wind developers and investors need to significantly increase the pace of analysis for market and site attractiveness, resource availability, and project selection.  That is according to Youwind Renewables, a unique web-based solution for optimising early-stage offshore wind development. 

Despite a volatile year for offshore wind development in 2023, where interest rate rises, and commodity price increases led to the abandonment of auctions where bid prices were deemed too low for returns, and the cancellation of initial offtake agreements, a record number of offshore wind development zones will be allocated globally in 2024 -2025, driven by national clean energy development targets. 

But, in order to realise project timelines, developers and their investor partners increasingly need a fast and reliable means of screening early-stage projects to ensure optimal decision-making in the deployment of capital.   

By offering a solution that enables developers to rapidly assess project location, wind resource, project layout – including wake losses – and the best installation sequence, Youwind’s technology provides the offshore wind industry with a route to reducing the overall time taken for project site screening by up to 80% – significantly accelerating the project development cycle. 

We made it finalist to Elia Group Open Innovation Challenge!

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Our IT solution OptiWindow brought the attention of the jury for its user-friendliness and calculation power when optimizing logistics secuences offshore and awarded us to be the Top 5 most innovative company out of more than 90 candidates start-ups for the contest. It was a great experience working on a PoC project for Elia Group and presenting our solutions to the jury.

Wind Europe Offshore 2019

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Wind Europe Offshore 2019

Let’ts meet in Copenhagen November 26-28thfor the Wind Europe Offshore 2019

You can find YOUWINd on stand E-D3a

We would love to show you how to save time and money with the YOUWINd methods.

YOUWINd model is an innovative optimisation model for used for offshore wind project analysis. This SaaS incorporates site, supplier and market data so that the users can in an easy and effective way evaluate their own projects and find the most optimal technical and financial solution.

Goldwind 8MW prototype unveiled

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Chinese wind turbine supplier, Goldwind, launched today the prototype of a new offshore wind turbine with a turbine capacity of 8MW and rotor of 175m.

Last year, Goldwind launched three other models:

  • GW168-8MW
  • GW184-6.45MW,
  • and the typhoon-adaptive and low-wind-speed offshore GW168-6.45MW.

And this latest model is called GW175-8.0MW according to sources. Shanghai Electric unveiled their 8MW turbine last summer and Dongfang Electric already announced a 10MW model themselves.

We couldn’t help ourselves analysing this new wind turbine with known projects so we went right ahead and added the specifications into YOUWINd model that now has access to all the offshore wind turbines that are commercially available. Below you can see the results from having had used this turbine at East Anglia 1 for example.

We will look forward to reading more about the results of the prototype tests but all users of YOUWINd model can now test this for their own projects and the other new wind turbines from the Chinese makers as mentioned above.  If you sign up for a free trial you can test how.

AEP calculations uncertainties

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Many users needed to have implemented uncertainty calculations to their scenarios so we went right ahead and added that to the YOUWINd scenario comparisons.

Our calculated figure for electricity production is the P50 AEP. This figures is the level of production that is estimated to be exceeded 50% of the time in a year or the average in a year. A P90 figure is therefore an estimate of production that is forecasted to exceed 90% of the time in a year. The P stands for percentile. The YOUWINd model P50 value is the mean value which represents the AEP with highest probability.

The AEP estimate varies form year to year as we don‘t know the future wind speeds and therefore we always include uncertainties in our calculations. These includes uncerainties in our own modelling and the data itself. No developer can promise that the wind farm site will not have years that will underperform. Like in YOUWINd model as in other calculation models, the distribution of uncertainty does not perfectly follow normal (Gaussian) distribution but for the sake of simplifying calculation we use this distribution. We do this because we use the mean wind speed with 10 minute interval at 100m hub height and statistically representative data is not always available.

Therefore we have also the P90 figure shown for the AEP which is more used by investors that want a more viable estimate of the production over the lifetime of the wind farm. In the graph below we show the AEP with P50 and P90 for a typical wind farm production estimate.

 The turbine’s power output is entered for each wind speed. The result of this calculation is the AEP or annual energy production.

Depending on the reliability of the original data, turbine height, turbine design, the variability in the weather, and maintenance or breakdown history, you will have a likelihood or probability that the actual energy output will be less than the calculated AEP.

Causes of uncertainty:

The calculation of the scenarios from the best estimate of the P50 takes the total uncertainty into account that has been involved in the AEP modelling in the YOUWINd model.

These are the following:

  • Data uncertainties – Weather data from our data source = Xdata = 5%
  • Interannual variability – Weather changes year to year = Xweather = 5%
  • AEP calculation model – calculation uncertainty = Xmodel = 4%

When you combine the uncertainty with the factors we can calculate the P90 using the normal distribution model. When combining the uncertainty models we calculate them as independent from each other and then we can calculate the overall uncertainty in the modal as:

Our overall uncertainty is valued as 8,1% in our probability calculations. There are many ways of lowering this uncertainty but this implies more accurate datasets.

With this uncertainty we can evaluate our probability normal distribution. Let‘s have a look at an example with the Borssele 1+2 Example scenario that is the first on the list in the free version of YOUWINd model (app.youwindmodel.eu). The distribution level can be seen on the figure below:

The result of the  P90 and the P50 can be seen in the scenario overview page but the overall calculation is based on the P50 calculations.

Try it for yourself using your own data and make your own scenarios using the YOUWINd model. Try it out here: app.youwindrenewables.com