Abstract
The global offshore wind industry is growing with unprecedented speed. The Global Wind Energy Council has raised its outlook for 2030 to a total of 316 GW installed for offshore wind (Lee and Zhao, 2022). Over the sea basins, we see wind farms and clusters getting increasingly larger, turbines becoming taller, and floating wind turbines moving from the demonstration phase to the pre-commercial phase and being installed in deeper waters. The increase in size raises a series of challenges to the fundamental science and technologies that have been calibrated and applied to smaller turbines, small wind farms, and simpler systems. Thus, for the modeling of wind turbine and farm wake effects, we are facing the challenge of having both high fidelity and large coverage. For modeling turbulence, we need to break through the classical boundary layer turbulence theories by considering large-scale atmospheric variability. For grid integration and system control, we need to advance our tools to handle big data. For floating turbines and farms, we need to take the complicated sea and ocean conditions into account, as well as the multiscale atmospheric flow effects. Additionally, we need to understand how the new seascape in the presence of wind farms affects the overall offshore environment. The rapid success of the offshore wind industry leaves us little time to identify knowledge gaps, speed up relevant research, and catch up technologically to accommodate efficient, effective, and healthy offshore wind development.
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