Speaker
Description
With offshore wind farms increasing in size and number, their interaction with regional wind and weather patterns plays an increasingly important role. Wind turbines extract energy from the boundary layer, resulting in downstream wakes with reduced wind speeds. When clustering many turbines together, wakes coalesce and can persist for tens of kilometers, affecting neighboring farms and regional conditions.
We study the impact of a gigawatt-scale cluster on regional weather using multi-year high-resolution mesoscale simulations. We focus on the Belgian–Dutch cluster, the largest offshore cluster to date with an installed capacity of over 3.7 GW. Modeled wake effects are validated against lidar and satellite data, and potential impacts on precipitation and sea surface waves are explored. This work provides a first long-duration assessment of the accuracy of this setup, paving the way for broader use of mesoscale wind farm parameterizations in different phases of wind farm projects.
