Wind droughts and the allocation of offshore wind capacity across European seas: Sample-average and distributionally robust conditional value-at-risk models
Rüzgâr kuraklıkları ve Avrupa denizlerinde açık deniz rüzgâr kapasitesinin dağıtımı: Örneklem ortalamalı ve dağılımsal olarak sağlam koşullu riske maruz değer modelleri
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Abstract
Low-wind weeks are a central risk for power systems that rely on offshore wind. This paper studies how offshore wind capacity should be allocated across sites in European seas to limit that risk. Daily capacity factors are simulated for a 15-megawatt reference turbine at 30 existing or planned offshore sites from the North Sea to the Black Sea, using reanalysis winds from January 1981 to October 2026. Capacity shares are chosen to maximise the mean output of the worst 5% of weeks, either for the empirical distribution or for the worst distribution within a Wasserstein ball, solved as an exact linear programme on bounded support. I show that, for small radii, robustification adds a penalty proportional to the largest capacity share and therefore acts as a soft cap on concentration. In a rolling out-of-sample evaluation over 1,347 weeks from 2001 to 2026, the risk-based allocations raise the lower-tail output by 14–19% relative to equal shares, 25–30% relative to minimum variance and 50–57% relative to the single best site, while also increasing mean output relative to the first two. They combine the North Sea and the Baltic with Atlantic sites whose winds peak in summer, such as the Canary Islands, and with Aegean sites driven by the summer Etesian winds. Robustness improves the lower tail slightly when only three to five years of data are available, and cross-validation selects positive radii far less often when twenty years are available. The results quantify the value of cross-basin planning for offshore wind.
Keywords
OR in energy; Distributionally robust optimization; Conditional value-at-risk; Offshore wind; Portfolio selection
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