Better explicating the strengths and shortcomings of these models will help refine projections and improve transparency in the years ahead.
Image credit: Witsawat.S.
Edited by William C. Clark, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved January 10, 2012 (received for review July 19, 2011)
Abstract
The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that if the United States is to generate 20% of its electricity from wind, over 50 GW will be required from shallow offshore turbines. Hurricanes are a potential risk to these turbines. Turbine tower buckling has been observed in typhoons, but no offshore wind turbines have yet been built in the United States. We present a probabilistic model to estimate the number of turbines that would be destroyed by hurricanes in an offshore wind farm. We apply this model to estimate the risk to offshore wind farms in four representative locations in the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal waters of the United States. In the most vulnerable areas now being actively considered by developers, nearly half the turbines in a farm are likely to be destroyed in a 20-y period. Reasonable mitigation measures—increasing the design reference wind load, ensuring that the nacelle can be turned into rapidly changing winds, and building most wind plants in the areas with lower risk—can greatly enhance the probability that offshore wind can help to meet the United States’ electricity needs.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: paulina{at}cmu.edu.
Author contributions: S.R., P.J., M.J.S., and J.A. designed research; S.R. performed research; I.G. contributed the meteorological component; S.R., P.J., M.J.S., and J.A. analyzed data; and S.R., P.J., I.G., and J.A. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1111769109/-/DCSupplemental.
Quantifying the hurricane risk to offshore wind turbines
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