FEATURE
AUTOMATIC ROUTE GENERATION AND CABLE NETWORK OPTIMIZATION FOR OFFSHORE WINDFARMS BY DR. VENKATA JASTI AND HERMANN KUGELER
A
s global warming and climate change continue to impact the planet in many ways, there is an increased demand for renewable energy sources. While landbased renewable energy technologies have been largely commercialized throughout the world, there has become a need to move power production offshore to harvest the large energy resource available, and reduce the need for land use that is often costly in coastal locations. Wind speeds offshore are also generally higher than on-shore, and have less turbulence, which means power can be more efficiently harvested. For these reasons, many Asian and European countries have begun implementing offshore wind to increase their renewable energy generation, but the United States is just now beginning to develop its offshore wind infrastructure. The global offshore wind capacity rose above 30 GW in 2020, and is expected to experience continued rapid growth in the years and decades to come. President Biden has set an ambitious goal to install 30 GW of offshore wind in the U.S. by 2030. This is 1000x the U.S.’s installed offshore wind capacity as of 2019. While the U.S. is somewhat late to the game in terms of offshore wind adoption, it provides the opportunity to leverage existing technologies and tools that have been used commercially elsewhere. It also pro-
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vides the opportunity to look at the European and Asian markets and figure out ways of improving designs, reducing costs, and streamlining the project development process.
OPPORTUNITY FOR IMPROVEMENT IN CABLE DESIGN PRACTICES WITHIN WINDFARM PLANNING
There are several project planning tools on the market that have been used around the world to plan and develop layouts and designs for offshore windfarms. These tools help developers optimize the design and layout of a windfarm based on the location’s wind resource, estimated performance based on wind capture modeling, and development costs. While these tools are helpful in optimizing the above-surface infrastructure, they skip over a critical piece of offshore windfarm infrastructure: the subsea power cables. Many of these software tools were initially developed for land-based windfarms, where the cabling wasn’t a significant cost factor in terms of the overall project cost, and construction practices are much more accommodating, but for offshore windfarms the cable costs become a much more significant portion of the overall project cost. Much of the west coast United States has deeper waters that make fixed offshore wind infeasible, and require floating offshore