The Carbon Trust Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) has launched an international competition to improve current wind resource estimation models in the sector.
The competition will allow modellers access to six validation cases from operational wind farms in the North Sea, owned by the OWA’s industry partners.
Industry and academic applicants are invited to participate to improve and strengthen wake models.
The aim is to allow more accurate energy yield predictions.
The Carbon Trust said the staged benchmarking process is open for model developers and end-users to participate anonymously.
The competition will run through several rounds through to December 2019.
It is expected the work will provide a universally agreed methodology for validating wake models, the Trust added.
The competition is being led by CENER and managed by the Carbon Trust with funding from the OWA partners – the Scottish Government, EnBW, E.ON, Iberdrola, Innogy, Orsted, Shell, SSE, Equinor, and Vattenfall.
Carbon Trust offshore wind manager Liam Leahy said: “The continued improvement in wake modelling for the offshore wind industry has been a key theme under the OWA programme, and the value of assessing modelling against actual operational data is one of the most valuable exercises we can do as a group to support the offshore wind industry.
“Bringing together competition participants to allow them to assess their wake models will only improve the process in predicting energy estimates from offshore wind farms.”