Global levelised cost of electricity from offshore wind

There is strong agreement across the energy modelling community that wind energy will be a key route to mitigating carbon emissions in the electricity sector. This paper presents a Geospatial Information System methodology for estimating spatially-resolved levelised cost of electricity for offshore wind, globally. The principal spatial characteristics of capital costs are transmission distance (i.e. the distance to grid connection) and water depth, because of the disparate costs of turbine foundation technologies. High resolution capacity factors are estimated from a bottom-up estimation of global wind speeds calculated from several decades of wind speed data. A technology-rich description of fixed and floating foundation types allows the levelised cost of electricity to be calculated for 1 x 1 km grid cells, relative to location-specific annual energy production, and accounting for exclusion areas, array losses and turbine availability. These data can be used to assess the economically viable offshore wind energy potential, globally and on a country basis, and can serve as inputs to energy systems models. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.