Extreme Wind Gust Impact on UK Offshore Wind Turbines: Long-Term Return Level Estimation

Wind turbines (WT) are built to a particular standard based on past or current climate conditions. With climate change, the frequency of exposure of a WT to extreme weather events (EWE) will be more extreme than those for which they were designed, which may lead to decreasing operational performance and physical damage to the turbine structure. Given this, there is a need to investigate the location of future planned offshore wind farms (OWF) to ensure resilience to future wind extremes. The research presented covers the UK exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and uses the 2. 2km UK Climate Projection 2018 (UKCP18) hourly maximum wind gust datasets. Two future scenarios corresponding to 2021-2040 and 2061-2080 are considered for future planning analysis. The statistical characterization of extreme wind gusts is assessed using multiple distributions, and a Beta distribution is found to adequately predict the hourly wind gust data. Changes in extreme wind loading on wind turbine structures (50-year return period, hereafter $U_{50}$) are investigated. Both risk ratio (RR) and relative change (RC) calculations have been used to set the recommended site from the achieved wind gust threshold corresponding to a $U_{50}$. As a result, regions in the North have a 99.6% increase in desired OWF siting locations in the 2061-2080 scenario. The East region has a 71.4% increase in the 2021-2040 scenario. In both scenarios, the South region has a decreased number of suitable future locations to site OWF.