Ocean Winds, Orsted, Crown Estate and TotalEnergies have joined a project that is studying the interaction of turbines with the atmosphere at two RWE offshore wind farms in the German Bight.
The measurement campaign for the Global Blockage Effect in Offshore Wind project (GloBE), a joint industry initiative within the Carbon Trust’s Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA), has been extended by four months.
This will allow data to be gathered during the spring period, when atmospheric boundary layer heights are low and global blockage effects (GBE) are expected to be more pronounced.
Since its launch in early 2021, the OWA GloBE project has continued to attract interest from industry.
With Ocean Winds, Orsted, Crown Estate and TotalEnergies joining the budget has increased to €5.9m, including in-kind contributions.
Following the completion of the measurement campaign, the primary data will be used by a specialist group of experts to validate and improve various computational models.
Some of these models are already used to inform investment decisions; others represent the next generation of models.
GBE refers to the slow-down of the wind as it approaches a wind farm, and the corresponding speed-up of the wind elsewhere.
Historically, wind farm designers considered only wake effects – the reduction of wind speed downstream of a turbine or wind farm.
However, as wind farms get bigger, the impact of GBE grows, creating an increased need for the industry to understand this phenomenon to minimise financial uncertainty.
The OWA GloBE project aims to reduce such uncertainty by creating a comprehensive primary dataset, comprising of several terabytes of measurements, that can be used as the industry benchmark for assessing and quantifying the impact of GBE on energy production.
The measurement campaign started at RWE’s offshore wind farms Amrumbank West and Nordsee Ost in the German Bight in September 2021.
The two wind farms are separated by a strip of empty sea approximately 4 km wide, in which RWE is currently constructing its Kaskasi wind farm.
Until the first turbines are placed, the Kaskasi site provides an opportunity to create a unique experimental setup to detect and quantify GBE both within a wind farm and between wind farms.