Project overview - Bergen Offshore Wind Centre (BOW)

MAIN QUESTIONS:

• How do soil properties vary throughout a particular wind farm site?
• Can geotechnical properties be predicted from geological data and seabed morphology?
• What anchor and foundation types are suitable for particular areas and landforms?
• How do different geological properties require different geotechnical solutions, and how do these solutions drive cost?
• What is the optimal anchor and foundation types across the entire NCS south of 67°N
   

Contact: Haflidi Haflidason and Christian Haug Eide

Conwind is a Norwegian-Chinese collaborative project on offshore wind technologies. The project is lead by NORCE and have partners from both former Norwegian research centers for environmentally friendly energy (FME) on offshore wind: NORCOWE and NOWITECH. 

The University of Bergen/Bergen Offshore Wind Centre (BOW) leads work package 1 on wind prediction (nowcasting) and wind farm control. 

Project period: January 2020 - December 2023

Contact at Bergen Offshore Wind Centre (BOW): Mostafa Bakhoday-Paskyabi

Project to develop two continuing education courses in offshore wind in 2022.

Contact: Finn Gunnar Nielsen

COTUR (Measuring COherence and TURbulence with lidars) is a joint reserach project under the lead of NORCE (former CMR) with the Geophysical Institute of the University of Bergen, the University of Stavanger, and Equinor as partners. Main goal is the investigation of coherence in the turbulent wind field at scales that are relevant for state-of-the-art offshore wind turbines, with rotor diameters of beyond 150 m. Core of the campaign is the deployment of three scanning lidar systems (Leosphere WindCube 100S) in a triangular setup that are operated synchronized.

Project period: January 2019 - March 2020

Read more: Measuring the wind

Contacts: Joachim Reuder and Martin Flügge

PI at BOW: Cristian Guillermo Gebhardt Cristian.Gebhardt@uib.no  

The research activities related to this project pursue digitalization as an innovative tool in the field of offshore wind energy research. Special emphasis is set but is not limited to fluid-induced loads due to wind fields and ocean waves as well as dynamics by means of the of the data-driven computational mechanics The duration of the project is from 2022 to 2025: 1 postdoc position over 4 years funded by the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen 

The objective of the project is to bring up-to-date insights on technology potentials for offshore wind together with research on the legal and societal challenges associated with offshore wind development. The purpose is to support the design of a refined, efficient and adequate legal framework for offshore wind in the North Sea Basin in general, and in Norway in particular. The project will collect and analyze data on public perception and acceptance of offshore wind and related infrastructure and analyze legal challenges from large-scale wind projects in the North Sea Basin in the framework of technical options and public perception and acceptance.

WP1: Legal aspects of offshore wind. Contact: Sigrid Eskeland Schütz (UiB/Faculty of Law) and Eirik Finserås (UiB/Faculty of Law)

WP2: What are credible, legitimate and salient aspects of offshore wind? Contact: Michael Tatham (UiB/Faculty of Social Science)

WP3: Aligning offshore wind sciences in law and social sciences. Contacts: Sigrid Eskeland Schütz (UiB/Faculty of Law) and Finn Gunnar Nielsen (UiB/BOW)  

WindSYS is led by the Institute of Marine Research with Equinor, Fiskebåt, NINA, SINTEF Ocean and the University of Bergen (Geophysical Institute/Bergen Offshore Wind Centre (BOW) amongst the collaborationg partners. The project starts in 2022 and has a duration of 4 years.

The project is a collaboration between central scientific, private industrial and governmental actors that are interested in environmental impacts of the offshore floating wind turbines. The main focus is the effects on important fish stocks, to evaluate positive and negative impacts of wind turbines. GFI/BOW participate in bridging between structural vibrations of turbines and underwater noise generation/propagation through spatiotemporal measurements and modelling of underwater noise emitted by turbines to allow site-specific recommendations of acoustic emission.

Contact: Mostafa.Bakhoday-Paskyabi@uib.no

Erosion of wind turbine blades due to hydrometeors (e.g. rain droplets, graupel pellets, or hail stones) is a major challenge and cost factor for the operation of wind turbines, as it reduces the power output (due to a negative impact on the aerodynamics of the blades) and increases the costs for maintenance and repair (due to a considerable reduction in lifetime of the blades). The size distribution of rain droplets and the probability of occurrence of graupel and hail offshore is poorly monitored and understood, leading to a crucial knowledge gap with respect to estimation and prediction of blade erosion for a given off-shore site.

The project has three closely related objectives:

The first objective is to develop realistic erosion test requirements for off-shore wind turbine blades, based on a climatology of hydrometeor size distributions and the probability of occurrence of situations with high erosion potential due to large droplets, graupel and hail.  For this purpose we will use, among others, a unique 6-year data set of rain droplet size distributions from the Norwegian coast in Bergen, measured by the Geophysics Institute by a vertically-pointing Micro Rain Radar (MRR). This data set is at the moment the best available proxy for offshore conditions off the Norwegian coast.  We will then apply our new test requirements on material samples from selected wind turbine blades This data set can also be used to identify synoptic situations with high erosion damage potential, where a temporary reduction of the rotational speed could prevent most of the damage.

The second objective is to create a least erosion map for the North Sea which can be used to identify potential new wind farm sites that will exhibit low erosion conditions.

The third and final objective is to develop a new protective coating made of nano-diamonds for the leading edge on wind turbine blades. For this we will use a recent nano-diamond coating facility developed at the IFT Nanophysics group. Material samples with the new coating will also be subjected to our erosion test requirements. The project, which is set to run for three years, is an interdisciplinary cooperation between the Nanophysics group at the Institute for Physics and Technology lead by PI Prof. Bodil Holst, and the group of Experimental Meteorology at the Geophysics Institute, lead by CO-PI Professor Joachim Reuder. For experimental erosion tests we collaborate with the world leading group in the field, DTU Wind Energy, lead by Dr. Charlotte Bay Hasager.

Contacts: Bodil Holst and Joachim Reuder

Offshore wind power could and should play a leading role in providing consumers with clean, affordable and renewable energy in the near future due to its characteristics, and thus, can be a key player in limiting climate change. While the technology is already here, the regulation and policy to foster and deal with the consequences of its exploitation are still nascent creating the need for further legal research.

This project will contribute to filling this gap. It will do so by providing a critical and rigorous interdisciplinary analysis of the current regulation of offshore wind in the EU/EEA and other selected jurisdictions from a market-oriented perspective. The project will clarify the current state of the law concerning the governance of offshore wind and build up policy recommendations to promote the full potential of electricity produced from wind energy.

GOV-WIND is organized in three work packages or ‘clusters’:

i) Regulating renewable energy in the Clean Energy Package – Particularities of offshore wind?;

ii) Licensing Offshore Wind Farms;

iii) Introducing Offshore Wind Power in Energy Markets.

Contact: Ignacio Herrera Anchustegui

Significant cost savings in offshore wind industry can be achieved through the technological advancements as well as comprehensive knowledge of environmental conditions. and physical processes relevant for the operation of large offshore wind farms can deliver significant cost savings to wind farm. HIPERWind aims therefore to decrease the cost of energy from offshore wind turbines by at least 9% through reduction of risk and uncertainty. HIPERWind aims at using a sophisticated numerical model chain of different fidelity, highly advanced probabilistic design, and enhanced reliability methods to optimize the offshore farm operating strategy. Further, to enhance the reliability prediction, and improve state of the art in the wind energy design. UiB is responsible for WP2on multiscale modelling of the wind field. A major part of the work starts in March 2021. However, since December 2020, UiB has contributed to WP1 with data collection and processing to be used in WP2 as well as uncertainty assessments in other WPs. Part of a report and two sets of lidar-based datasets were processed for these tasks.

We have developed several modelling/processing tools for conducting multiscale modelling of the wind field in the offshore wind park area. We have developed a constrained turbulence box model and started to apply a module for WRF model to better account for the sea surface roughness length in the presence of waves. The COAWST coupled system was compiled and run in our high-performance computing system. In 2021 two researchers will be hired UiB for this project. 

Contact: Mostafa.Bakhoday-Paskyabi@uib.no

Bergen Offshore Wind Centre (BOW) contributed with knowledge about the physical parameters related to the wind turbines' design and the physical effects the turbines have on the enironment.

Contact: Mostafa Bakhoday Paskyabi

To understand the air-flow inside a wind farm and thus be able to optimize layout as well as operation of the wind farm, advanced numerical tools, capable to resolve a wide range of time and spatial scales, are needed. The coupling of the various scales needs, however, a careful nesting scheme as well as comperhensive understanding of influential physical and structural processes. UiB has a considerable instrument park for measurements of the wind and wave conditions in front and inside a wind farm. A large amount of observational (offshore) data acquired by UiB will then provide a framework to improve the accuracy/performance of numerical CFD tools by developing, for example, new sets of parameterisations for different processes and their interactions with turbines/farm.

The “ Parallelized Large-Eddy Simulation Model” (PALM) model system 6.0 is a state-of-the-art LES code suitable for offshore wind farm applications, modified to incoorporate effects of wind turbines through a rotating actuator disk. PALM can be considered to be the most comprehensive LES code in the world, including embedded models to represent complex terrain and topography, the ocean surface (and interaction with the oceanic mixed layer), Lagrangian particle transport, and both offline nesting to large-scale models (e.g. COSMO is available and the coupling of PALM to the WRF model is under progress), as well as online self-nesting. Building upon very close cooperation with the PALM developer group at University of Hannover in this project will ensure rapid build-up of a very competent LES group focusing on the application of PALM to study the offshore wind farms under the influence of different processs such as varying atmospheric stability and sea-state conditions. One of challenging and important applications of the developed LES tool, will be tailored to the study of the importance of meandering wake on the power production of wind turbines and the structural loads, in particular for floating wind turbine applications.

The proposal is organized in three work packages that will focus on addressing the scientific questions and a work package to management and dissemination:

WP0. Management and dissemination.

WP1. Data collection and model configurations.

WP2. Develop wave model coupled with PALM.

WP3. Validation.

Contact: Mostafa Bakhoday-Paskyabi

The project has a total volume of 14MNOK and is funded with 12 MNOK via the NFR FRIPRO program. It is coordinated by UiS, with UiB, SINTEF Energy and SINTEF industry as partners. 

The primary objective is to reduce LCOE for offshore wind energy applications by an improvement of the design basis of future LOWT (>12MW) in free-wind and wake conditions by using wind and response data from offshore wind farms. Secondary objectives:
1. Characterization of the wind field in the MABL in non-neutral conditions using high-frequency wind data from several offshore sites and analysis the COTUR dataset. Finally, we will recommend a suitable wind spectral model and coherence parameters for non-neutral wind conditions.
2. Loads and response simulation of large floating wind turbines in non-neutral conditions. Validate the turbine response for large offshore wind turbines using in-situ measurements. Compare response and anchor line loads of different types and size of substructures and their sensitivities to non-neutral wind.
3. Wake simulations of LOWT (bottom fixed and floating) in non-neutral conditions using CFD that will be implemented in a DWM model (SIMA-DIWA) for input into aeroelastic simulations.
The anticipated final outcome will be a reduction in uncertainty of the turbulence-induced loads on large LOWT in free-wind and wake conditions.

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Project summary LOWT

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LOWT experts

Contact: joachim.reuder@uib.no 

LIKE improves, tests and refines the technology thus expanding these areas of application. LIKE promotes wind energy applications such as wind resource mapping using scanning lidars and control of single wind turbines or entire wind farms in order to increase energy production and reduce mechanical loads. LIKE maps unusual atmospheric flow patterns over airports in real-time and thus improves the safety of landing aircrafts. LIKE explores wind and turbulence under extreme conditions at the sites of future European bridges paving the road for optimal bridge design. LIKE trains 15 ESRs to an outstanding level at European academic institutions and industrial companies, thus forming strong interdisciplinary relations between industry and technical sciences. These relations are implemented through employment of the ESRs at academia as well as industry, and through intersectoral secondments.

Contact person at BOW: Joachim Reuder

This project deals with how geological information can contribute to a better understanding of moorings of offshore wind farms. The project is a collaboration between Department of Earth Science, Bergen Offshore Wind Centre and Equinor. The project is organized around a PhD-project and is based on geological and geophysical data from areas where offshore wind farms are planned. New data will also be acquired as part of the project.

Contact: Haflidi Haflidason and Christian Haug Eide