Sensitivity study of the economics of a floating offshore wind farm. The case study of the SATH® concrete platform in the Atlantic waters of Europe

Abstract

The objective of the present work is to develop a sensitivity analysis to determine the most essential parameters that affects to the economic feasibility of a marine wind farm composed by platforms built in concrete material. The main purpose is to analyze how the input variables such as number of offshore wind turbines, the energy produced by one wind turbine, the interest rate, the capital cost, the electric tariff, etc. affect to the economic output variables: the Levelized Cost Of Energy (LCOE), the Internal Rate of Return (IRR), the Net Present Value (NPV) and the Discounted Pay-Back Period (DPBP) of the considered offshore wind farm. This paper studies the concrete floating offshore wind platform SATH®, developed by the SAITEC enterprise. Results indicate what are the most relevant variables in economic terms to take them into consideration for their installation in the future.

Keywords

• Floating offshore wind
• Concrete wind platform
• Sensitivity analysis
• IRR
• Economic feasibility
• LCOE