certain offshore wind development. For example, how will the increased energy policy targets influence the total sea space required for offshore wind production? But also, what innovations are happening in the sector that can benefit society and how might this influence decisions? This could lead to questions such as: Do we still need to look at sea depth when floating wind farms can be developed soon? And how do the new offshore wind farms and innovations influence the potential development of a transnational North Sea energy grid? Offshore wind has become a competitive renewable energy source in North Sea countries and it has been steadily growing since the early 2000s with a cumulative total installed capacity of 15.8 GW in Europe. Most European offshore wind installations (71%) are situated in the North Sea. However, because of the increasing spatial demands from users of the marine environment, it is time for the renewables sector to start thinking and talking in spatial terms. How do we reduced conflicts with other sea uses, and how can we work together? If the sector is able to work together and provide solutions for these conflicts, the growth potential for offshore wind will increase significantly.
Figure 1. Offshore Wind Farms in the North Sea at various development stages. Source COAST – University of Oldenburg, NorthSEE Project
Understanding spatial implications in NorthSEE
with many different organisations and forums being active (Figure 2). However, until now, these organisations have given limited consideration to spatial planning aspects of their work.
Maritime spatial planners develop plans for their own national or regional sea space. However, since 2015, a new EUfunded project, called NorthSEE 1 , had been working on connecting the marine planners across the North Sea. Thereby the project aims for domestic plans to be better aligned with each other. Furthermore, on offshore energy, the NorthSEE project is trying to understand and obtain the spatial information of the offshore wind energy sector, so it can assist planners and give them a better base for their decisions. There is already a long tradition of regional energy cooperation in the North Sea,
The NorthSEE project has produced a report called ‘Status Quo and future trends of offshore energy production from an MSP perspective’. In this report, the collected information on energy policies and goals form a base for broadly predicting the space needed in the sea for offshore wind energy (3,500 km² by 2020 and over 8,000 km² by 2030). Accommodating these spatial needs will result in an increasing number of conflicts between offshore wind and other maritime users in the coming decade and could potentially affect the marine environment in a
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negative way. The report also defines several industry trends, which might change the spatial needs of the sector. Examples are larger, more powerful wind turbines further offshore in deeper waters. Recent Scottish projects such as Hywind2 and Kincardine3 have also introduced floating wind which has the advantage of unlocking deeper water sites and a significantly greater wind resource. There are also other technological advancements involving the up-scaling of the conventional single rotor offshore wind turbines to multi-rotor offshore wind turbines. This exploratory work on industry trends is a first step towards understanding the spatial effects of innovations. However, more expert input is required to get a better understanding and improve the opportunities.
www.northsee.eu
Offshore WIND | NO. 04 2018
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