Future Climate Change Impact On Wind Gust For Offshore Wind Turbines Cut-Out Within The UK Exclusive Economic Zone

Climate change can lead to more frequent high wind gusts, which represent the future risk that planners for future offshore wind farms (OWF) should consider, as wind turbines (WT) are built to standards that rely on current climate conditions. High wind gusts at 35m/s can lead to decreasing the WT operational performance. Given this, we use three climate scenarios corresponding to 1981-2000, 2021-2040, and 2061-2080 to investigate future changes in the WT cut-out wind gust (35m/s) threshold (exceeding the cut-out threshold will lead to no-operation). The future climate change analysis considered the probability of exceeding the 35m/s threshold in the future as the risk ratio (RR) and changes in return time corresponding to the 35m/s threshold in future climate scenarios as the relative change (RC). The research focuses on four regions in the UK exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and uses the 2.2km UK Climate Projection 2018 (UKCP18) hourly maximum wind gust datasets. Using RC calculations, we found most of the locations that have high 35m/s wind gust return periods in the 2021-2040 and 2061-2080 scenarios compared to the baseline scenario lay in the North region with an increased low risk to more frequent 35m/s locations equal to 79.2% and 99.8%, respectively. In RR calculation, we found a spatial correlation with RC locations in two future scenarios indicating that most sites with decreasing risk of occurring 35m/s wind gusts also have a decreasing risk of exceeding the 35m/s threshold in the future.