Global Monitoring of Offshore Wind Projects: Review of Current Methods and A Strategy for Dataset Enrichment

Global renewable energy capacity needs to triple by 2030 to at least 11,000 GW; a goal promoted by G20 leaders at COP28 in September 2023. Offshore wind projects will form a significant part of that goal. How do we evaluate whether offshore wind is on track? How do we then show the progress for different countries/regions? The answer to these questions relies on monitoring the location, stage of development and operating capacity for individual projects.Data collection methods can be classified by their source - administrative (e.g. Government or organisations with a legal authority - planning permission/registration for subsidies, tax relief or feed-in tariff scheme), crowd-sourced and remote-sensed. The resulting data has a number of properties including temporal extent, spatial extent etc.The aim of this short communication is to compare existing datasets which were curated to enable the large scale monitoring of offshore wind projects. We will then describe additional data linkages, as well as discuss the benefits of creating a "digital twin" on a projects end-of-life options.