Study "The Offshore Wind Farms - Challenges, risks and opportunities for building more resilient national energy system"

Wind energy is one of the rapidly growing sources of energy due to low emissions resulting from its use. The energy can be harnessed both onshore and offshore. There is however, a growing interest in developing offshore wind resources owing in part to the large energy resources available offshore and availability of development space.

Offshore wind is expected to grow strongly over the coming years. The EU Strategy on Offshore Renewable Energy, published in November 2020, acknowledges that tapping the energy generating potential of European waters - from the north and Baltic Seas to the Atlantic Ocean - it is crucial if Europe is to achieve its carbon-emission reduction targets for 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050.

Offshore wind is at the forefront of this evolution and the emergence of floating wind makes affordable wind power a possibility in many areas of the globe. With increasing recognition that renewable electricity generation is vital for decarbonizing the global energy system and hence mitigating global climate change, offshore wind farms (OWFs) are of growing significance in many countries in Europe and beyond.

Energy-, aquaculture-, and transport infrastructures are increasingly being established offshore. Moving operations further away from coast, makes both logistics and operations more challenging.The development an operation of marine infrastructures exert environmental pressures on the oceans, threatening marine ecosystems. Multipurpose offshore platforms are a way to address these issues and presnt a viable solution to meet these growing demands through the integration of various user functions in a single unit. They will provide significant benefits in terms of shared use of infrastructure (foundations, moorings, energy transfer, etc.), resources (staff, material, energy, etc.) and services (monitoring, maintenance, etc).

As offshore wind development continues to grow, it is expected there will be more potential for interference with existing radar systems. Wind turbines within radar line-of-sight can increase clutter that may inhibit target detection, increase the generation of false targets. Military vulnerability is another issue that should be addressed in the context of analyzing the different aspects related to wind farms. Therefore, impacts from arrays on military training, readiness and research can be limited.

The use of power-to-X green hydrogen plus more conventional energy storage systems will change the generation profile compared to a plain offshore wind farm. More multi-technology projects will be definitely seen in the future. The term "hybrid" offshore wind projects in Europe is also used to describe projects that double as interconnection between 2 countries. Instead of building a cable, the path of the interconnector passes through an offshore wind farm, potentially allowing power to be sold to two markets rather than one, thereby avoiding doubling up on th transmission investments.