Offshore Wind Energy Site Selection Strategies
Summary
The siting of offshore wind energy installations combines environmental, technical, economic and logistical considerations to optimise power yield while minimising ecological and social impacts. Strategic site selection frameworks integrate wind resource assessment, seabed and bathymetric surveys, distance from shore, grid connection infrastructure, marine habitat sensitivity and regulatory constraints. Multi-criteria decision-making tools and spatial analysis via GIS address the trade-offs among energy yield, cost, environmental protection and stakeholder acceptance. Emerging approaches incorporate advanced uncertainty modelling and participatory planning to enhance transparency and robustness. Effective site selection underpins project viability, informs policy frameworks and drives global expansion of offshore wind capacity.
Research from Nature Portfolio
Recent studies have proposed a hybrid decision-making framework combining spherical fuzzy analytical hierarchy process and weighted aggregated sum product assessment to rank offshore wind power station locations in Vietnam. The method integrates sustainable development criteria derived through expert consultation and couples multi-criteria analysis with sensitivity and comparative evaluations to ensure robustness against variations in criteria weighting. Application to Vietnamese coastal zones demonstrates the approach’s capacity to identify optimal construction schemes and to guide regional planning and policy formulation.
Offshore Wind Energy Site Selection Strategies publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in offshore wind energy site selection strategies across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM): A systematic approach to evaluate and rank alternatives based on multiple conflicting criteria.
Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP): A structured technique for organising and analysing complex decisions using pairwise comparisons and priority scales.
Spherical Fuzzy Sets: An extension of fuzzy set theory capturing membership, non-membership and neutrality under spherical constraints to model uncertainty.
Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS): A hybrid ranking method combining weighted sum and weighted product models for comprehensive decision evaluation.
Neutrosophic Numbers: Mathematical representations allowing degrees of truth, indeterminacy and falsity to manage incomplete or uncertain information.
Geographical Information System (GIS): A framework for gathering, managing and analysing spatial or geographic data to support decision-making.
Sensitivity Analysis: An assessment of how variations in input parameters affect the outcomes of a decision model.
Evidential Reasoning (ER): A technique for combining evidence from multiple sources under uncertainty to support complex decisions.
Multiple Attribute Decision Analysis (MADA): A family of methods used to evaluate alternatives across several attributes, focusing on trade-off analysis.
References
- Offshore wind power station (OWPS) site selection using a two-stage MCDM-based spherical fuzzy set approach. Scientific Reports (2022).
- Type-2 neutrosophic number based multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) approach for offshore wind farm site selection in USA. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (2021).
- A Multi-Criteria Approach to Evaluate Floating Offshore Wind Farms Siting in the Canary Islands (Spain). Energies (2021).
- Comparison of multicriteria analysis techniques for decision making on floating offshore wind farms site selection. Ocean Engineering (2022).
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