Neue Veröffentli­chung zum Offshore-Netzausbau mit dem Titel „High-resolution scenario building support for offshore grid development studies in a geographical information system“

Our external doctoral candidate Felix Fliegner just published his first paper in co-authorship with Prof Dominik Möst on the topic of offshore grid development in Europe. According to the goals of the European member states, electricity generation from offshore wind energy is to be increased from less than 30 GW today (8 GW in Germany) to more than 300 GW in 2050 (70 GW in Germany). Against the backdrop of various route restrictions (including requirements from maritime spatial planning, landcover, etc.) the question arises, how the offshore power grid can be optimally designed for the wind farms to be connected to shore and countries to be interconnected with each other.

Felix developed an automated workflow that creates a network of possible and spatially feasible grid expansion candidates, which can be assessed for optimality in a classic transmission capacity expansion study. The novelty of this workflow lies in the high resolution and consideration of a multitude of constraints, that can be balanced against each other. In addition, it introduces a purely analytical and open data-based methodology to come up with infrastructure scenarios, that have been developed manually and arbitrarily in the past. The methodology is demonstrated at the example of Baltic and Nort Sea and depicts the time horizon of today towards 2050. We hope that it contributes to shape an efficient and robustly optimised offshore grid of the future.

The article is published open access in the Journal “Energy Strategy Reviews” (impact factor: 8.2) and accessible under the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2023.101110 It is part of Felix industrial doctoral studies in collaboration with the German transmission system operator 50Hertz.