Measuring and Simulating Wind Farm Wakes in the North Sea for Use in Assessing Other Regions

“Wind theft”, the extraction of upstream wind resources by neighboring wind farms on account of wind farm or cluster wakes, is receiving wider popular attention. Cluster wakes need to be accounted for in wider planning strategies, for which measurements and wake models can be deployed to aid this process. To contribute to such planning measures, a flight campaign for investigating cluster waking and other phenomena in the North Sea was conducted in 2020 and 2021 to contribute extra flight data obtained during the first flight campaign of 2016 and 2017. We report the latest results of the 2020–2021 flight campaign following the work and methodology of Cañadillas et al. (2020), where, using the 2016–2017 flight measurements, wake lengths extending up to approximately 60 km in stable stratification were inferred, consistent with an explicit stability-dependent analytical model. Analysis of the recent 2020–2021 flight data is approximately consistent with the results of Cañadillas et al. (2020) in stable conditions, albeit with greater scatter. This is because Cañadillas et al. (2020) analyzed only flights in which the wind conditions remained nearly constant during the measurement period, whereas the current dataset includes more variable conditions. Comparisons with the analytical-based engineering model show good first-order agreement with the flight data, but higher-order effects, such as flow non-homogeneity, are not accounted for. The application of these results to the stability information for developing offshore wind energy regions such as the East Coast of the USA and Bass Strait, Australia gives an outline of the expected wake lengths there. Simple engineering models, such as that demonstrated here, though primarily designed for commercial applications, need to be further developed into advanced spatial planning frameworks for offshore wind energy areas.