Summary Analysis of Different Offshore Wind Capacity Density Drivers in Proposed U.S. Projects and Impacts on Progress Towards State and Federal Deployment Targets

Conference · Thu Nov 09 04:00:00 EST 2023

OSTI ID:2212470

Mulas Hernando, Daniel; Musial, Walt; Duffy, Patrick; Shields, Matt

Understanding the density of offshore wind development - or the "capacity density" - is important for state and federal offshore wind planning efforts and to track progress towards policy goals. NREL has traditionally assumed a capacity density of 3 megawatts per square kilometer (MW/km2) when estimating the U.S. project pipeline (Musial et al. 2022), but capacity densities for existing European offshore wind farms ranged from 2-19 MW/km2 (Borrmann et al. 2018). We track the expected capacity densities of the proposed U.S. projects in the East Coast and make an analysis by state and by developer to identify what are the capacity density norms in the industry and whether the state in which the development efforts are taking place has some impact on capacity density. We also analyze the effects of the area occupied by station keeping systems on capacity density for lease areas dedicated to floating projects and provide a list of main capacity density drivers. This summary analysis sets a baseline to study how different capacity density drivers could impact the progress towards state and federal deployment targets. Given the currently delineated Renewable Energy Areas in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and the basis from the summary analysis, we estimate the expected offshore wind deployment over time federally and by state and compare it to the state and federal deployment targets. The proposed analysis helps identify gaps and needs to meet state and federal targets, which provides sufficient information to propose strategic supply chain and policy planning with the objective of meeting deployment goals.

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)
• DOE Contract Number: AC36-08GO28308
• OSTI ID: 2212470
• Report Number(s): NREL/PR-5000-87947; MainId:88722; UUID:683d7e1b-6fe4-4122-a2da-8d1b163af0fa; MainAdminID:71040
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY,WIND ENERGY
U.S. offshore wind deployment goals
U.S. offshore wind deployment targets
capacity density
offshore wind
outer continental shelf