Impacts of Siting Considerations on Offshore Wind Technical Potential in the United States

Abstract

We estimated the technical potential for the offshore wind (OSW) resource in the United States under two siting regimes to characterize the uncertainty pertaining to the local drivers of siting within a national context. We established Open Access and Limited Access regimes to represent upper and lower bounds on OSW deployment, respectively. These included spatial constraints such as technology depth limits, military use areas, protected areas, existing infrastructure, shipping lanes and more. The same spatial considerations are also considered in the Limited Access regime, but with additional buffers to existing infrastructure as well as a reduced capacity density assumption. Capacity density is the concentration of wind energy development for a given area specified in terms of megawatts (MW) per square kilometer (km 2 ). In the Open-Access regime we used a 5 MW/km 2 assumption, while in the Limited Access scenario we assumed 3 MW/km 2 . This difference reflects our intention for the Open-Access scenario to serve as an upper bound for OSW technical potential, with the Limited-Access scenario as a lower bound. We also applied three technology advancement scenarios to each of the siting regimes. The three technology scenarios (Conservative, Moderate, and Advanced) represent plausible improvements in turbine technology including increased rated power and higher hub heights.

Atlantic Offshore Wind Transmission Study

“…Siting regimes are from the 2021 wind supply curve versions (https://www.nrel.gov/gis/wind-supply-curves.html). See Lopez et al (2021;Zuckerman et al (2023) for offshore-wind-specific details. 6 The AOSWTS focuses on capacity expansion scenarios that do not include major interregional transmission to consider scenarios where challenges to onshore siting and permitting prevent these large builds.…”

“…We recognized regional ocean data portals as an important data source for the study. Prior to this study, we obtained siting layers from several ocean data portals as inputs to NREL's Renewable Energy Potential (reV) model (Maclaurin et al 2021) to calculate offshore wind energy capacity, generation, and cost based on intersection with grid infrastructure and ocean-use characteristics (Zuckerman et al 2023). Note that this previous study was associated with siting offshore wind plants rather than transmission.…”