Opportunities to Improve Deployment Prospects of Offshore Wind

 This dissertation covers a body of work concerned with the deployment of offshore wind  energy. Deploying large amounts of renewable energy is a key aspect in transitioning to a low?carbon economy and limiting the negative effects of climate change. However, in addition to  technical and economic challenges, renewable energy deployment must satisfy environmental,  social, and regulatory interests. Given the breadth of disparate interests affecting deployment prospects, I develop models and frameworks that help quantify the costs and benefits of offshore  wind deployment, demonstrate how several interests can be balanced in plant design, and  operationalize qualitative factors to inform decision makers on the tradeoffs of deployment  strategies. The technological scope of these studies is on offshore wind renewable energy which  is a nascent energy source with a large—still untapped—technical potential, and energy  decarbonization potential.  

First, I consider a novel way of deploying floating offshore wind turbines that reduces physical  obstructions and allows turbines to be built in less-contentious waters. I quantify one  environmental benefit and the cost of this strategy. I find that the strategy realizes a cost penalty  of at least 30 US dollars/megawatt-hour and eliminates up to 900 kilometers of mooring chains for  a 1-gigawatt array. While this added cost is substantial, there are further opportunities and  scenarios where this strategy can make sense. I then investigate plant technology and site  alternatives using a multi-criteria analysis framework to compare the suitability of alternatives  based on optimizing techno-economics and minimizing impacts. I find that the larger plants the  industry is pushing toward are fragile in terms of suitability of locations, while smaller plants are  more robust with respect to locations. I also find that there are large areas where the two  perspectives align that the industry should pursue. This suggests that an overly narrow view on techno-economics only can lead to uncertain project outcomes. Finally, I propose a way to  operationalize socio-political aspects and regulatory obligations of the adoption environment in  order to compare transmission strategies from offshore wind which may face differential  obligations. I find that shortening the development process by one year is equivalent to an  investment tax credit of 2.6% and may be worth more than 65 million euros for a single project. I  also find that there are very few scenarios where a novel and expensive transmission strategy is  more advantageous than the baseline technology, but it is critical to quantify the impact of more  expensive strategies that may ease regulatory obligations. The results suggest that further  improvements of the novel technology are needed to directly compete on a cost basis. In future  work, I plan to explore green hydrogen deployment that considers socio-political factors and a  market evolution element of the technology to understand how different adoption environments or  socio-political attitudes can affect levels of attainment of renewable energy capacity or overall  carbon abatement.