Competition to Improve Offshore Wind Resource Estimates Launched

The Offshore Wind Accelerator (OWA) is Carbon Trust's flagship collaborative RD&D programme which was set up between the Carbon Trust and nine offshore wind developers 11 years ago. This new 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 their wake models. By sharing their data, the OWA partners hope to progress the industry and allow more accurate energy yield predictions. 

Liam Leahy, offshore wind manager at the Carbon Trust and programme manager for the OWA’s wakes and wind resource technical working group, 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.”  

Different validation datasets, taken from operational wind farms, will span a wide range of wind conditions related to wind farm topology and wind climate characteristics. These will be used to strength-test wind resource predictions, by comparing those predictions to real world examples.