Offshore Electricity Infrastructure in Europe - European Wind Energy ...

Methodology – Simulation inputs and Models
3.4 Case-independent model
During the course of the OffshoreGrid study it became
apparent that the appropriate offshore grid design is
very sensitive to the specific cases under investigation:
distances to shore, wind farm capacities, price
profile differences between the countries, etc. The
results of the specific cases are useful but general
conclusions are necessary for the optimal offshore
grid design and also for clear recommendations, which
is one of the central goals of the OffshoreGrid study.
A case-independent model was therefore developed
with inputs from the infrastructure model and the power
system model.
The model is built in the mathematical programming
language Matlab and focuses on two design problems,
namely the teeing-in of wind farms into an interconnector
between two countries and the interconnection of
two countries via two offshore wind farm hubs (these
scenarios are described in more detail in Section 4).
The model performs an extensive sensitivity analysis
that looks into the impact of the price difference between
countries, the direction of the price difference,
the impact of cable or wind farm capacities, and the
impact of cable lengths. The model then takes this information
and produces general conclusions regarding
the impact of changing one or more of the previously
listed parameters on the viability of an offshore wind
farm configuration. This allows the development of
general offshore grid design rules, which are then validated
using case studies.
30 OffshoreGrid – Final Report