EuroWindWakes: Multiscale Modelling of European Wind Energy Wake Effects

At a glance

• The planned dense installation of offshore wind farms in the North Sea will mean that wake effects and the global blockage effect (GBE) become more important for the calculation of electricity yields. Current models can only reproduce these effects with considerable uncertainties.
• Through improvement and validation of these methods, the international research project EuroWindWakes aims to reduce these uncertainties significantly, thereby enabling optimal planning of maritime areas and reliable electricity generation predictions. This will include investigations of the wake effects for the entire North Sea.
• Fraunhofer IWES is responsible for the coordination of the full project as well as the development of modeling techniques suitable for use in industry.

The challenge

The Members of the European Union bordering the North Sea set an expansion goal for offshore wind energy together with Norway in 2022: at least 260 GW of offshore wind capacity are to be installed by 2050. However, this densest installation of offshore wind turbines worldwide comes with the risk of a reduction in the capacity factor. Wakes and the GBE can decrease electricity yields considerably as a result of increased turbulence and lower wind speeds.

The modeling approaches currently employed most frequently for calculating electricity yields are only capable of reproducing these effects with considerable uncertainties. These uncertainties can have a significant impact on both the economic benefit due to lower electricity generation overall and the economic profitability due to overly optimistic bids when submitting tenders for offshore areas.

The solution

This is where the international research project EuroWindWakes comes in. It aims to reduce prediction uncertainty from 20-30 percent to below 10 percent. To achieve this goal, the cooperation partners from Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands are improving and validating modeling approaches for wake effects on a European scale. Recommendations for action derived from the results will be made available to all relevant stakeholders via the industry partners involved in the project.

Fraunhofer IWES is responsible for the coordination of the full project as well as the development of modeling techniques for wake effects suitable for industrial application on a European scale. To do so, the scientists will be further developing mesoscale wind farm parametrizations and the open-source industry model FOXES for very large wind farms among other things. The plan is to combine different models in order to enable validation and benchmarking, then to derive recommendations for action from the results.

The added value

EuroWindWakes will allow optimized planning of marine areas and reliable prediction of electricity generation. As such, the project will create an essential prerequisite for tapping the enormous potential of offshore wind energy. In addition, EuroWindWakes will contribute to creating an important hub for the emerging European Center of Excellence for Wind Energy, an initiative of the European Energy Research Alliance (EERA JP Wind).