The offshore wind industry, which aims to reduce the operational costs, usually achieved through learning curves and supply chain improvements, has seen drastic cost increase over the last five years. In order to sustain the competitiveness of the offshore wind industry against other renewable energy sources, the cost of offshore wind needs to come down to today’s onshore cost. This cost reduct...

In recent years, the use of offshore wind turbines has been considered on the agenda of the countries which have a significant maritime boundary due to more speed and stability of wind at sea. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of wind turbulence on the aero-hydrodynamic behavior of offshore wind turbines with a monopile platform. Since in the sea, the wind turbine structures ar...

The current key challenge in the floating offshore wind turbine industry and research is on designing economic floating systems that can compete with fixed-bottom offshore turbines in terms of levelized cost of energy. The preliminary platform design, as well as early experimental design assessments, are critical elements in the overall design process. In this contribution, a brief review of cu...

Wind power is currently the fastest growing renewable energy application in the United States. Many regions, however, such as the state of Florida, do not have high enough average wind speeds for wind power to be economically feasible. Nevertheless, Florida's extensive coastline may present the opportunity for implementing offshore wind technology. Offshore winds are typically stronger due to t...

Structural optimization of offshore wind turbine structures has become an important issue in the past years due to the noticeable developments in offshore wind industry. However, considering the offshore wind turbines’ size and environment, this task is outstandingly difficult. To overcome this barrier, in this paper, a metaheuristic algorithm called Enhanced Colliding Bodies Optimization...

In order to meet the demands of turbine integration into the wind park grids, advanced power converter technologies have successfully been developed by ABB. Along with the ongoing move from onshore to offshore wind installations, the system reliability, maintenance costs and product quality have come into focus to a far greater extent. Even the smallest service for offshore installations immedi...

Offshore wind resource maps for the coastal waters off Shirahama, Japan were made based on 104 images of the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) onboard the ENVISAT satellite. Wind speed fields were derived from the SAR images with the geophysical model function CMOD5.N. Mean wind speed and energy density were estimated using the Weibull distribution function. These accuracies were examine...

The demand for renewable energy has led to construction of offshore wind farms with high-power turbines, and many more wind farms are being planned for the shallow waters of the world’s marine habitats. The growth of offshore wind farms has raised concerns about their impact on the marine environment. Marine mammals use sound for foraging, orientation and communication and are therefore possibl...

This paper provides a decision support tool (DST) to analyze and evaluate the project value of offshore wind energy projects within the framework of project finance. The DST is based on a discounted cash-flow model in combination with a Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) to measure project risks and manage these risks. To consider the special requirements of debt capital providers in this context, ke...