Assessing the Impact of Offshore Wind Siting Strategies on the Design of the European Power System

TL;DR

This paper examines how different offshore wind siting strategies influence the design and cost of the European power system using a two-stage approach involving siting and capacity expansion planning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-stage method to evaluate offshore wind siting strategies and their impact on system design and costs in Europe.

Findings

Complementarity-based siting reduces system costs by up to 5% without deployment targets.

Power output-based siting is more cost-effective when country-specific deployment targets are enforced.

Results are robust against variations in wind capital expenditure and weather variability.

Abstract

This paper provides a detailed account of the impact of different offshore wind siting strategies on the design of the European power system. To this end, a two-stage method is proposed. In the first stage, a highly-granular siting problem identifies a suitable set of sites where offshore wind plants could be deployed according to a pre-specified criterion. Two siting schemes are analysed and compared within a realistic case study. These schemes essentially select a pre-specified number of sites so as to maximise their aggregate power output and their spatiotemporal complementarity, respectively. In addition, two variants of these siting schemes are provided, wherein the number of sites to be selected is specified on a country-by-country basis rather than Europe-wide. In the second stage, the subset of previously identified sites is passed to a capacity expansion planning (CEP) framework that sizes the power generation, transmission and storage assets that should be deployed and operated in order to satisfy pre-specified electricity demand levels at minimum cost. Results show that the complementarity-based siting criterion leads to system designs which are up to 5% cheaper than the ones relying the power output-based criterion when offshore wind plants are deployed with no consideration for country-based deployment targets. On the contrary, the power output-based scheme leads to system designs which are consistently 2% cheaper than the ones leveraging the complementarity-based siting strategy when such constraints are enforced. The robustness of the results is supported by a sensitivity analysis on offshore wind capital expenditure and inter-annual weather variability, respectively.