Smarter Harbor Costing, GIS Layers, and Flexible Financial Modeling in Youwind

March 29, 2023 Articles & PR | Product Update | Offshore 7 min read time

In the ever-evolving landscape of offshore wind farm development, every technical refinement can translate into faster decisions, sharper investment forecasts, and lower LCOE calculation. In this March 2023 release, Youwind expands its offshore digital platform with new harbor-based O&M cost modeling, richer GIS layers, and customizable financial tools—deepening our commitment to data-driven decisions in wind energy.

Let’s explore how these new features help wind energy professionals—from layout engineers to financial modelers—create more bankable and resilient offshore projects.

Cost Estimation Based on Real Harbor Distances

Why it matters:
In offshore wind farm planning, Operations & Maintenance (O&M) costs are highly sensitive to the distance between the wind farm and the harbor. Until now, modeling this accurately has required manual steps or assumptions.

What’s new in Youwind:

Youwind introduces an automated method to estimate O&M and installation costs based on sailing distance to selected harbors.
A global harbor library is now integrated into the Area Screening tool. Users can also upload custom harbors with specific parameters.
Distance to harbor and sailing time are auto-calculated based on the central coordinate of the selected development area.

In the Project Overview, sailing costs are now shown directly under OPEX, proportional to both distance and turbine positions—enabling faster and more realistic LCOE calculation.

Feature benefit: Real-time harbor selection, dynamic OPEX/CAPEX adjustments, and stronger inputs for financial modeling wind energy.

Use case: When comparing two zones with similar wind resource assessment, this harbor feature lets developers select the one with more efficient logistics, improving bankability.

Enhanced GIS Layers for More Informed Site Selection

Youwind strengthens its GIS constraint analysis by integrating new spatial data layers:

Fishing activity intensity, covering key European maritime regions like the Baltic Sea, North Sea, and Northeast Atlantic
Shipping route density maps at 1 km resolution, sourced from EMSA

Additionally, higher-resolution wind resource data (1 km) is now available through an enhanced integration with VORTEX.

This enables faster and more accurate wind resource assessment, site prioritization, and early stage screening.

Learn more in our VORTEX integration webinar.

Financial Model Upgrade: Choose Your Depreciation Method

Challenge: Not all developers—or geographies—follow the same accounting rules for asset depreciation.

Solution: Youwind now allows users to choose between:

Straight-line depreciation

Declining balance depreciation, where the asset depreciates faster in the early years

This provides more realism in financial modeling wind energy, giving insight into tax impact, project ROI, and payback time under different scenarios.

Use this function in the Finance tab to simulate how each method affects annual cash flow, LCOE, and investor returns.

Layout Optimization: More Flexibility with Auto-Adjusted Row Lengths

Creating an optimal wind farm layout often means adjusting turbine spacing, especially when balancing wake loss modeling with installation logistics.

In this update:

The maximum number of turbines per row is now a true upper limit. If a fixed value doesn’t fit spatial constraints, the tool intelligently recalculates.

The Turbopark wake model was updated to align more closely with Ørsted’s benchmark implementation.

This means smoother generation of efficient, constraint-aware wind farm layout proposals—especially useful in complex offshore zones.

Beyond Software: A Guided and Collaborative Experience

All these features are part of Youwind’s broader commitment to an integrated platform, backed by:

Offshore experts who support users throughout the wind farm planning journey

A collaborative workflow for wind developers, reducing silos between GIS, finance, and engineering

Automatic traceability for decisions, improving transparency and bankability

Have a question or want to go deeper? Just reach out to info@youwindrenewables.com

Final Takeaway

These updates are more than technical upgrades—they’re levers for improving bankable yield assessment, reducing uncertainty, and shortening the decision-making cycle.

Whether you’re screening zones, designing layouts, or forecasting cash flow, Youwind’s new tools help you stay one step ahead.

Written by Edvald Edvaldsson, Founder and CTO

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