The Global Blockage Effect (GBE) has become a hot topic in offshore wind in recent years. While there is a broad industry consensus that the GBE causes decelerations in front of offshore wind farms which reduce the energy yield, different opinions exist on how to consider its downstream impacts and how to account for redistribution of energy, for example. This is commercially relevant as uncertainty in wind farm performance drives a high cost of capital for offshore sites. Any over estimation of the GBE leads to the de-valuation of offshore wind projects.
The GloBE project aims to:
- Measure the decelerations and accelerations of the wind around the Heligoland windfarm cluster
- Understand their sensitivity to atmospheric parameters such as the height of the boundary layer
- Test various hypotheses and modelling approaches against the measured data
- Build an industry consensus around how blockage should be modelled and how the corresponding uncertainty should be assessed
This should allow offshore wind developers to reduce the uncertainties assigned to blockage effects, making it easier to finance the construction of new offshore wind farms.
Scheduled completion
December 2022
Budget
€5.9m including in-kind contributions
Lead Partner
RWE
Partners
EDF Renouvelables, EnBW, Equinor, Ørsted, Shell, ScottishPower Renewables, Vattenfall, Vaisala, the Technical University of Denmark, TotalEnergies, Ocean Winds, The Crown Estate
Setup under
Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA)
Contact
Neil Adams, Project Manager, neil.adams@carbontrust.com
Related news
Mar 2022 - OWA GloBE measurement campaign extended
