Wind turbine locations in the North Sea in 2050 : A new dataset

The UK is planning 50 GW of offshore wind in its sector of the North Sea by 2030, and perhaps 120 GW by 2050. Other North Sea nations have similar ambitions.

At these scales of deployment the space occupied will be significant. This may have environmental impacts that are not apparent at smaller scales, and it will impact on other sea users.

This talk will update the MASTS community on our ongoing work in understanding the national ambitions of all the North Sea nations, identifying areas in which the resulting wind farms are likely to be built, and suggesting plausible array locations, both fixed and floating, taking account of projected increases in turbine size between now and 2050.

Since we last presented to this forum in 2021 we have updated the projections to reflect the increases in national ambitions following the invasion of Ukraine and we have gone beyond zones for offshore wind to individual turbine locations. We will present a new dataset, available to the research community, which gives a plausible set of coordinates for wind turbines in 2050. We hope that this will be of use for further studies to investigate the effects and implications of this very large scale rollout.