Offshore Wind Energy Resources

Growth in the wind energy industry has come from the urgent need to combat climate change. While wind can be harnessed both on land and offshore, more frequently, developers are looking offshore where the wind blows stronger and more consistently. Offshore winds tend to flow at higher speeds than onshore winds, thus allowing turbines to produce more electricity. Since the potential energy produced from the wind is directly proportional to the cube of the wind speed, increased wind speeds of only a few miles per hour can produce a significantly larger amount of electricity. Therefore, offshore wind turbines have a higher capacity factor and generate energy more efficiently. Much of this potential energy is near major population centers where energy costs are high and land-based wind development opportunities are limited.

Offshore Wind Resource Assessment 

Wind resource assessment is the process by which wind power developers estimate the future energy production of a wind farm. Accurate wind resource assessments are crucial to the successful development of wind farms. Regional wind maps are valuable tools for site finding, but are not accurate enough to justify the financing of the development. The single most important characteristic of a site is its wind speed, and the performance of a wind farm is very sensitive to uncertainties and errors in the basic wind speed estimate. This means that initial wind resource assessment must be extremely accurate in order to procure funding, as well as for the economic development of a wind farm.
Needs for accurate offshore wind resource assessment have been rapidly growing all over the world with increase of interests in renewable energy and of knowledge that offshore winds can be a promising energy source. Currently, bankable offshore wind resource assessment data is collected by erecting permanent or semi-permanent meteorological towers designed to measure winds using a variety of wind sensors, (ultrasonic, LIDAR, cup and vane), at different heights, though not typically at hub height. Due to the nature of building a met-tower offshore, the costs can be as high as $3US to $10US million and require substantial bureaucratic hurdles, licensing, permits, and environmental assessments. AXYS' new WindSentinel™ Offshore Wind Resource Assessment Buoy solves these issues because it can be deployed for considerably less money, it requires almost no bureaucratic navigation, and it does not require special environmental permissions or allowances. 

Learn more about how the AXYS WindSentinel™ can help you compete for Your share of the wind.