Feasibility of large scale wind turbines for offshore gas platform installation

Abstract

Although, offshore wind energy development emerged under way at the beginning of the millennium, Europe is planning to bring offshore wind energy capacity to over 11.6 GW until 2020. This is nearly 10 times todays installed offshore capacity and equal to nearly 50% of the new planned investment in the wind energy market. The North Sea and the Baltic Sea are the main investment areas due to the shallower sea depth. In this paper an approach to use old gas / oil platforms as the foundation for a wind turbine is examined. An off shore gas platform close to Istanbul Turkey with over 20 years more lifetime is taken as a real-life case, with the wind resource information extracted from the recent large-scale wind atlas study, Global Wind Atlas version 2. The study aims to combine recent offshore economical models with up-to-date scientific wind energy yield assessment models to have a more realistic look on the feasibility of such an approach. The results show that, with the assumption of no extra support structure and capital loan costs, a project can be feasible with bigger then 8MW wind turbines. These may involve a large initial investment but the return of the investment (ROI) can be as low as 8 years. With bigger turbines, profit can be increased, and ROI can be decreased while the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) displays minor decrease after 10 MW.