Opti-Owecs: Final Report Volume 0: Structural And Economic Optimisation Of Bottom-Mounted Offshore Wind Energy Converters: Executive Summary

It was the particular mission of the project 'Structural and Economic Optimisation of Bottom-Mounted Offshore Wind Energy Converters' (Opti-OWECS) to extend the state-of-the-art, to determine required methods and to demonstrate practical solutions which will significantly reduce the electricity cost. This will facilitate the exploitation of true offshore sites on a commercial base in a medium time scale of 5 to 10 years from now. In several fields, e.g. support structure design, installation of the offshore wind energy converters, operation and maintenance, dynamics of the entire offshore wind energy converter, structural reliab ility considerations, etc., the study demonstrated new propositions which will contribute significantly to a mature offshore wind energy technology. This was achieved due to a smooth cooperation of leading industrial engineers and researchers from the wind energy field, offshore technology and power management. Moreover, an innovative design methodology devoted particularly to offshore wind energy conversion systems (OWECS) was developed and successfully demonstrated . The so-called 'integrated OWECS design approach ' considers the components of an offshore wind farm as parts of an entire system. Therefore interactions between sub-systems are considered in a complete and practical form as possible so that the design solution is governed by overall criteria such as: levelised production costs , adaptation to the actual site conditions, dynamics of the entire system, installation effort as well as OWECS availability. Furthermore, a novel OWECS cost model was developed which led among other work of the project to the identification of the main cost drivers, i.e. annual mean wind speed, distance from shore, operation and maintenance aspects including wind turbine reliability and availability. A link between these results and a database of the offshore wind energy potential in Europe, developed by the previous Joule project JOUR 0072, facilitated the first estimate of energy cost consistent over entire regions of Northern Europe. The European Commission has supported the project in the scope of the framework of the Non Nuclear Energy Programme JOULE Ill (Research and Technical Development) under grant JOR3-CT95-0087.