Site Selection of Combined Offshore Wind and Wave Energy Farms: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Growing energy demand worldwide and onshore limitations have increased interest in offshore renewable energy exploitation. A combination of offshore renewable energy resources such as wind and wave energy can produce stable power output at a lower cost compared to a single energy source. Consequently, identifying the best locations for constructing combined offshore renewable energy farms is crucial. This paper investigates the technical, economic, social, and environmental aspects of Combined Offshore Wind and Wave Energy Farm (COWWEF) site selection. Past literature was evaluated using a systematic review method to synthesize, criticize, and categorize study regions, dataset characteristics, constraints, evaluation criteria, and methods used for the site selection procedure. The results showed that most studied regions belong to European countries, and numerical model outputs were mainly used in the literature as met-ocean data due to the limited coverage and low spatiotemporal resolution of buoy and satellite observations. Environmental and marine usage are the main constraints in the site selection process. Among all constraints, shipping lanes, marine protected areas, and military exercise areas were predominately considered to be excluded from the potential sites for COWWEF development. The technical viability and economic feasibility of project deployment are emphasized in the literature. Resource assessment and distance to infrastructures were mostly evaluated among techno-economic criteria. Wind and wave energy power are the most important criteria for evaluating feasibility, followed by water depth, indicators of variability and correlation of the energy resources, and distance to the nearest port. Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods and resource-based analysis were the most-used evaluation frameworks. Resource-based studies mainly used met-ocean datasets to determine site technical and operational performance (i.e., resource availability, variability, and correlation), while MCDM methods were applied when a broader set of criteria were evaluated. Based on the conducted review, it was found that the literature lacks evaluation of seabed conditions (seabed type and slope) and consideration of uncertainty involved in the COWWEF site selection process. In addition, the market analysis and evaluation of environmental impacts of COWWEF development, as well as impacts of climate change on combined exploitation of offshore wind and wave energy, have rarely been investigated and need to be considered in future studies. Finally, by providing a comprehensive repository of synthesized and categorized information and research gaps, this study represents a road map for decision-makers to determine the most suitable locations for COWWEF developments.

Development and Application of a GIS for Identifying Areas for Ocean Energy Deployment in Irish and Western UK Waters

“…However, the technology does appear to be well suited to Atlantic areas, particularly off the northwest coast of Ireland and the coast of Kerry and Clare. This finding follows a site suitability study which considered an OWC in the same region of interest, though the hypothetical scenario combined the OWC with an offshore wind deployment [15]. In that study, the Atlantic Ocean, west of Ireland (as well as Scotland and the Faroe Islands), ranked highest for deployment, followed by limited potential in the Celtic Sea.…”

“…Annual accessibility values of less than 20% off Ireland's west coast, using the 1.5 m Hs and 20 m/s wind speed limits, are also likely to pose a significant concern in terms of operations and maintenance, particularly considering UK guidelines for offshore wind, which suggest that anywhere having accessibility values below 20% is economically unviable [68]. This finding is significant given that much of the previous work on ORE site selection for the region of interest has not included the geospatial variability of accessibility [15,69]. The difference between the two accessibility maps reveals that wave height appears to have a greater impact on accessibility than wind speed, with higher values throughout the study area when the Hs threshold was increased (from 1.5 m to 2 m) and the wind speed threshold was decreased (from 20 m/s to 15 m/s).…”

“…Others apply additional criteria to identify suitable sites for both land-based [7][8][9] and offshore [10,11] renewable energy infrastructure. Many studies have adopted various criteria and methods to conduct on-site identification for ORE in recent years [12][13][14][15], including for wave energy [16][17][18] and tidal energy [19][20][21]. However, a thorough multi-criteria site suitability analysis for wave and tidal energy for the region of interest (see Section 2.1) is lacking.…”

The Expected Dynamics of the European Offshore Wind Sector in the Climate Change Context

“…According to these results, an increase in the future wind conditions for most sites was noticed, except those from the Baltic Sea, where a future wind decrease is expected. Better wind resources close to the sites from Ireland and the UK that are facing the North Atlantic coasts are noticed; this area also presents relevant wave conditions for the development of marine energy farms or hybrid wind-wave projects [71,72].…”

Non-Centralised Balance Dispatch Strategy in Waked Wind Farms through a Graph Sparsification Partitioning Approach

“…The economic feasibility of the wind energy industry greatly depends on the scalability, reliability, and maintainability of large-scale wind farms [1,2]. Especially for offshore wind farms (OWFs), more and more wind turbines are being placed together to reduce the deployment cost and increase the power capture per unit area at resource-rich locations [3].…”