Comparison of the capacity factor of stationary wind turbines and weather-routed energy ships in the far-offshore

Offshore wind energy technology has developed rapidly over the last decade. It is expected to significantly contribute to the further increase of renewable energy in the global energy production in the future. However, even with floating wind turbines, only a fraction of the global offshore wind energy potential can be harvested because grid-connection, moorings, installation and maintenance costs increase tremendously as the distance to shore and the water depth increase. Thus, new technologies enabling harvesting the far offshore wind energy resource are required. To tackle this challenge, mobile energy ship concepts have been proposed. In those concepts, electricity is produced by a water turbine attached underneath the hull of a ship propelled by the wind using sails. It includes an on-board energy storage system since energy ships are not grid-connected. Thus, the ships route schedules could be dynamically optimized taking into account weather forecast in order to maximize their capacity factors (CF). The aim of this study is to investigate how high the capacity factors of energy ships could be when using weather-routing and compare them to that of stationary wind turbines that would be deployed in the same areas. To that end, a modified version of the weather-routing software QtVlm was used. Velocity and power production polar plots of an energy ship that was designed at LHEEA were used as input to QtVlm. Results show that capacity factors over 80% can be achieved with energy ships and stationary offshore wind turbines deployed in the North Atlantic Ocean.