Environmental Contours for Two Offshore Wind Turbine Development Areas in the Aegean Sea
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to derive and propose site-specific joint environmental contours for two eligible Offshore Wind Farm Organized Development Areas (OWFODAs) in the Aegean Sea, Greece. The contours are tailored primarily for the design, structural reliability assessment and definition of site-specific environmental load combinations of offshore wind turbines (OWTs); they are quantified based on publicly available 28-year data sets related to offshore wind and wave conditions, namely, wave height, Hs, wave peak period, Tp and mean wind speed at the hub height of the wind turbine, u¯hub. A new methodology, using the modified Inverse First Order Reliability Method (IFORM), is proposed to accurately reflect the regional climate peculiarities, combined with fifth-order polynomials and a sigmoid function to fit the data of the Weibull parameters and correctly capture the low- and mid-range values of Hs, which are statistically far more frequent. Several results, in terms of 2D and 3D contour surfaces for two locations in each OWFODA, for 50-year and 100-year return periods are presented. Finally, two tables are cited: one gathering Hs and Tp values corresponding to the maximum u¯hub conditions, and another gathering u¯hub and Tp values corresponding to the maximum Hs conditions. The presented joint probability distributions and the environmental contour surfaces bridge metocean statistical modelling with renewable energy systems design. By providing site-specific joint metocean conditions, the proposed methodology supports offshore wind farm design and structural assessment, thereby contributing to sustainable wind energy development in the Aegean Sea.