Offshore grid topology optimisation with a geographical information system

Abstract

A novel methodology is investigated to identify and optimise large scale offshore grid topologies connecting multiple wind farms and countries with each other. A Geographical Information System (GIS) is setup to cluster wind farms and create a permissive graph topology. Its purpose is to propose grid layouts with potential hub locations and landing points bottom-up in a fully analytical toolchain, while avoiding manual scenario building. A coupled market model performs the investment optimisation into new lines on the GIS created graph. This two-step procedure is demonstrated at the example of the Baltic Sea Region for the target year 2040. It can be found, that future offshore topologies benefit from bundled transmission paths and many clustered wind farms. A sensitivity analysis reveals that the topology results are sensitive for wind farm location assumptions and pre-defined interconnectors or hubs. Not least, the capability of the onshore grid to integrate the influx of offshore wind power and the level of detail it is modelled in, directly reflects on the topology results for the offshore grid. It is concluded that optimising the future offshore grid is a quest of pan-European scale which benefits heavily from geo data based pre-processing in a GIS.