Strategic Planning of Offshore Wind Farms in Greece

Abstract

In the present article, a new methodological framework for the efficient and sustainable exploitation of offshore wind potential was developed. The proposed integrated strategic plan was implemented for the first time at national spatial planning scale in Greece. The methodological approach is performed through geographical information systems (GIS) and Microsoft Project Server Software and includes five distinct stages: (i) definition of vision/mission, (ii) identification of appropriate areas for offshore wind farms’ (OWFs) siting, (iii) determination of the OWFs’ layout, (iv) calculation of the OWFs’ (projects) total investment cost and, finally, (v) portfolio analysis. The final outcome of the proposed strategic planning is the prioritization of the proposed sixteen offshore wind projects based on their strategic value, as well as the estimation of the overall investment cost of the entire portfolio. High economic, socio-political and environmental benefits could be achieved through the implementation of only 60% of the total investment capital of the proposed strategic plan.

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.…”

“…Lastly, 15 and 14 diverse methodological approaches in total were identified in on-and offshore wind energy siting research, respectively. The most frequent method used for assigning weights to decision criteria (i.e., at the ASPA) was the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method in both onshore [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]23,27,29,33,37,39,40,42,44] and offshore [11][12][13]15,17,45,48,52,57] wind energy siting research (i.e., 17 of 20 (85%) and 9 of 10 (90%) studies that used a method for assigning weights to the AC, respectively). Specifically, the AHP was used mostly for assigning weights to the decision criteria (i.e., at the ASPA) and less frequently for prioritizing decision alternatives (i.e., at the ASPB) in the relevant siting studies.…”

“…The mean number of MEC applied in the offshore wind energy siting studies was 6, whereas predominant numbers of MEC were 3, 6, and 7. Additionally, the maximal number of MEC applied to a study was 13 [12,57], whereas there was a study with no MEC [59]. 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 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.…”

“…Numerous studies on onshore [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and offshore [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] WF siting aimed to solve this multidimensional siting problem by developing innovative site-selection methodologies [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]; applying numerous and various exclusion criteria (EC) and assessment criteria (AC) [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]; determining the relative importance of each AC [2][3]…”