Offshore wind energy act

Figure: Hereon / Beate Geyer, Ute Daewel and Nikolaus Groll

The necessity of the extension of renewable energies led to a statement of the nine NSEC (North Sea Energy Cooperation) countries that by the year 2050 an installed capacity of at least 260 GW in the offshore wind sector should be achieved.

Germany has an even more ambitious plan to increase offshore energy production within German waters to 70 GW by the year 2050. To provide a legal framework for this, the German government passed the Offshore Wind Energy Act (WindSeeG), which defines certain opportunities and restrictions for the utilisation of available areas in the German Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the North Sea and Baltic Sea.
Various areas which are designated for offshore wind energy production, should first be analysed by Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) with regard to important parameters for construction and operation of wind farms. This also includes the provision of meteo-marine physical data, as generated at Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon in the framework of coastDat for a long time.

Together with the BSH, Hereon will derive several meteo-marine hindcasts for the North and Baltic Sea and especially for the German EEZ. For this purpose, state-of-the-art models of the atmosphere, ocean, and sea state are used to generate time series from 1950 onwards of variables such as wind, water level, sea surface temperature and salinity, and the sea state. These are used to provide a better estimate of the meteo-marine climate over the past decades. This data will be useful for analysing whether the different requirements during the design, the construction, and operation phases of offshore wind turbines are fulfilled.

In addition, initial steps are being taken to determine the effect of wind turbines on physical parameters such as wind, waves, and ocean currents and to better assess the potential impact on the ecosystem.
The data generated will be made publicly available in agreement with BSH.