A Study on the Wind Energy Potential in the Romanian Coastal Environment

At the European level, offshore wind projects are already considered a competitive market. Nevertheless, this is not yet the case of the enclosed sea basins, such as the Black Sea, where no offshore wind farm is operating at this moment. From this perspective, the objective of the present work is to identify the most suitable sites where a wind project can be developed in the Romanian coastal areas. Various parameters, such as wind speed, water depth, distance to shore, and turbine performance, are considered. A picture of the local wind characteristics is first provided considering 20 years of reanalysis data, which cover the time interval from January 1998 to December 2017. The results indicated that the best sites to implement a wind project are located in the northern sector of the Black Sea, close to the Danube Delta. It was also noticed an important variation of the wind speed between onshore and 20 km offshore, for which an increase of about 55% was estimated.