ORBIT: Offshore Renewables Balance-of-System and Installation Tool

Abstract

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The Costs and Feasibility of Floating Offshore Wind Energy in the O'ahu Region

“…We increased the assumed lease/site auction price in ORCA from $50 million to $100 million to match the default assumption in ORBIT (Nunemaker et al 2020). The auction price is the amount paid by the developer through the federal leasing process to obtain site control, and the increase reflects higher prices paid in more recent auctions on the U.S. East Coast (Musial et al 2019b).…”

“…This would require an offshore wind project to use more export cables with smaller power ratings. We used NREL's Offshore Renewables Balance-of-system and Installation Tool (ORBIT) to determine how this would cause export system costs to scale (Nunemaker et al 2020). The lower capacity export cables are cheaper than the 300-MW rated baseline; however, the 135-MW constraint requires 5 export cables for a 600-MW wind power plant instead of 2 higher capacity cables.…”

“…We then used the following process to estimate the cost difference between an industry standard export cable and the 135 capacity cables that would be used in O'ahu based on ABB's three-core XLPE subsea cables (ABB). The costs of the default cable are based on the industry-reviewed, generic export cable costs used in ORBIT (Nunemaker et al 2020).…”

2020 Cost of Wind Energy Review

“…We estimated CapEx using ORBIT for balance-of-system costs. Soft costs are estimated based on the methodology from ORCA (Nunemaker et al 2020;Beiter et al 2016). Turbine CapEx is assumed to remain constant with the "2019 Cost of Wind Energy Review" based on industry data analyzed in the "Offshore Wind Market Report: 2021 Edition" (Stehly et al 2020;Musial et al 2021).…”

Power Sector, Supply Chain, Jobs, and Emissions Implications of 30 Gigawatts of Offshore Wind Power by 2030

“…We applied deployment and capital expenditure results from ReEDS to estimate supply chain impacts using a variety of tools, including NREL's Wind-plant Integrated System Design and Engineering Model (WISDEM®) for wind turbine costs and materials (Ning et al 2014), and Offshore Renewables Balance-of-System Installation Tool (ORBIT) for balance-of-system costs (Nunemaker et al 2020). ReEDS provided a deployment figure and capital expenditures broken down by region at each time step in the simulation.…”