Economic Aspects of a Concrete Floating Offshore Wind Platform in the Atlantic Arc of Europe

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to examine the economic aspects of a concrete offshore wind floating platform in the Atlantic Arc of Europe (Portugal and Spain). The life-cycle cost of a concrete floating offshore wind platform is considered to calculate the main economic parameters that will define the economic feasibility of the offshore wind farm. The case of study is the concrete floating offshore wind platform Telwind®, a spar platform with a revolutionary way of installing using a self-erecting telescopic tower of the wind turbine. In addition, the study analyses thirteen locations in Spain and twenty in Portugal, including the Atlantic islands of both countries. Results indicate that the economically feasible location to install a concrete offshore wind farm composed of concrete platforms is the Canary Islands (Spain) and Flores (Portugal).

Main Trends and Criteria Adopted in Economic Feasibility Studies of Offshore Wind Energy: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The NPV is the method that allows the evaluation of the feasibility of an investment, through the sum of its cash flows, considering the discounts since the beginning of the investment [31]. A financial option to justify investment in offshore wind farms is when the NPV value is positive [42,49,69]. Cash flows are composed of revenues and investment and the operation and maintenance costs and can be expressed by the Equation (1) [49]: In general, among the various criteria identified, the use of the LCOE, or simply the Levelized Cost of Energy, should be highlighted as the most used criterion.…”

“…where Capex is total cost of spending capital, FC t is cash flow for a period t, r is the discount rate, and t is the project lifetime. Also taken as an exact indicator, the IRR measures the expected future returns on a given investment and the higher this criterion, the greater the profitability [33,69]. This criterion can be calculated using the NPV formula, when the NPV value is equal to zero [33,55,69], according to Equation (2):…”

“…This is a model proposed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and defines the cost of electricity production per unit [107]. This makes it possible to carry out the comparison between different types of power-generation technology according to the economic aspect, which can be considered as a global benchmark criterion [69,71,92]. The LCOE can be calculated using the Equation (3) [65]:…”

Principais tendências e indicadores nos estudos de viabilidade econômica da energia eólica offshore: Uma revisão sistemática da literatura

“…O TIR (IRR) ou Taxa Interna de Retorno mede os retornos futuros esperados em um determinado investimento e quanto maior esse critério, maior será a lucratividade. Esse critério pode ser calculado atráves da formula do VPL, quando o valor do VPL for igual a zero (BAITA-SAAVEDRA et al, 2019). O LCOE é um critério que define o custo da produção da eletricidade por unidade, possibilitando realizar a comparação entre diferentes tipos de tecnologia de geração de energia, sobre o aspecto econômico, podendo ser considerado um critério de benchmark global (MAIENZA et al, 2020).…”

Economic Feasibility of Floating Offshore Wind Farms Considering Near Future Wind Resources: Case Study of Iberian Coast and Bay of Biscay

“…Despite the huge amount of studies dealing with the wind resource and the impact of climate change on wind resource in the area under study, the impact of climate change on the economic feasibility of floating OWFs has never been considered before. In fact, previous studies on the profitability of OWFs based their results on the wind resource data of recent years [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. However, it is important to note that feasibility studies are being developed to predict how the farm will perform in the near future.…”