Managing the oceans: Site selection of a floating offshore wind farm based on GIS spatial analysis

Systematic Review of Site-Selection Processes in Onshore and Offshore Wind Energy Research

“…Therefore, studies were either oriented toward different scientific topics (e.g., risk management) or conducting site-suitability analysis for other renewable energy systems (e.g., photovoltaics, biomass power plants) or different systems (e.g., waste management) were excluded. As a result, 53 onshore [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and offshore [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59] wind energy siting studies (46 peer-reviewed journal articles and 7 peer-reviewed international conference papers) were selected for further analysis.…”

“…The most restrictive limit of MEC was 25,000 m from the shore and was applied to protect the landscape, and avoid visual and acoustic disturbances [48]. The least restrictive (and predominant) limit was 0 m and was applied from protected environmental areas [10,11,15,45,47,48,[51][52][53][54][55]58], verified shipping routes [10,11,14,17,46,51,53,58], military zones [10][11][12]17,[46][47][48]51,55,57], bird habitats and migration corridors [10,17,47,51,53,55], pipelines and underwater cables [11,12,46,57], and fishing areas [15,47,55,58]. For MEC 1, an upper limit for economic and technical reasons was frequently applied, whereas in some cases, for technical reasons and social causes, a lower limit was set.…”

“…In studies conducted for Asian countries where wind potential is commonly low, the exclusion limit of MEC 4 was also low (e.g., 3, 3.5, or 4 m/s) and much lower than the limit applied in studies for European or North American countries (i.e., 6 or 7 m/s) (Figure 5). Lastly, only five studies [12,48,50,54,58] performed site-selection analysis for floating offshore WFs (i.e., defined exclusion limits greater than 60 m water depth), whereas the remaining studies developed a site-selection procedure for fixed support structures (Figure 6). Frequency of occurrence of exclusion limits applied for "wind velocity" criterion in the offshore wind energy siting studies.…”

“…The mean MAC number was 4, whereas the predominant MAC numbers were 0 and 7. Additionally, the maximal MAC number applied in a study was 15 [59], whereas there were several studies with no MAC [46,47,50,51,55,58]. The five most important criteria in terms of their mean weight were: (1) MAC 1, (2) MAC 2, (3) MAC 15, (4) MAC 3, and (5) MAC 12.…”

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

“…In this context, geographic information system (GIS) software is a conceptual framework that provides the ability to capture and analyze spatial and geographic data. GIS software has proven to be very useful in establishing optimal locations for wind farms, as supported by numerous previous studies [ 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 ].…”