Analyzing Europe’s Biggest Offshore Wind Farms: A Data Set with 40 Years of Hourly Wind Speeds and Electricity Production

Abstract

We provide an open, available, and ready-to-use data set covering 40 years of hourly wind speeds and synthetic hourly production signals for the 29 biggest offshore wind farms in Europe. It enables researchers and industry experts to include realistic offshore time series into their analyses. In particular, we provide data from 1980 to 2019 for wind farms already in operation and those that will be in operation by 2024. We document in detail how the data set was generated from publicly available sources and provide manually collected details on the wind farms, such as the turbine power curves. Correspondingly, the users can easily keep the data set up to date and add further wind farm locations as needed. We give a descriptive analysis of the data and its correlation structure and find a relatively high volatility and intermittency for single locations, with balancing effects across wind farms.

Keywords

• offshore
• Europe
• electric power system
• wind power
• energy system design
• renewable energy