by P. Gosselin, Apr 20, 2025 in NoTricksZone
A virtual wake-up call for the wind power industry. Two companies are sounding the alarm as they risk losing a lot of money.
Although they are not making losses yet, they are earning less. It’s about the the wake effect on wind farms by other wind farms.
The expansion of offshore wind energy in the North Sea is a central component of the European energy transition. However, two of the biggest players in the industry are now warning of negative effects: Ørsted and Equinor have jointly calculated that the planned 1.5 gigawatt wind farm ‘Outer Dowsing’ could cause significant so-called wake losses. These are yield losses that occur when the wind is weakened by upstream wind farms, causing downstream turbines to produce less electricity.
The two companies estimate that their existing wind farm projects in the British part of the North Sea could lose up to 361 million pounds – the equivalent of around 422 million euros – in the long term as a result of the new wind farm. The wind farms already in operation, which are dependent on constant wind conditions in order to achieve their planned output and ensure profitability, will be particularly affected.”
The phenomenon is called the wake effect and it is by no means new, as you can see in the Sciencemediacenter, an article from 2012:
The existence of wind turbine wakes has been known for decades. For smaller wind turbines and onshore wind farms, it for a long time was not considered to be so important. With the increasing size of individual wind turbines (multi-MW turbines) and larger wind farms in recent years, the size and length of the wakes are increasing and becoming increasingly relevant. I pointed this out back in 2010 and developed a simple model that can be used to estimate the length of wind farm wakes. This model shows the dependence of the length of wakes on subsurface roughness and thermal stratification of the air. Wakes of tens of kilometers in length can be predicted for offshore wind farms with stable stratification. Ms. Lundquist’s working group already presented simulation results with the WRF flow model in 2012, some of which show even longer wakes.“
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