Assessing standard-compliant offshore wind data in the North Sea

The optimization of site selection, installation and operation processes is crucial for the expansion of offshore wind energy. These processes strongly rely on the availability of prolonged and high quality metocean data. Traditional survey methods, while fundamental, often involve high costs, frequent downtimes and malfunctions, and limitations in data frequency storage and reliability. These constraints can hinder the timely development of offshore wind projects and escalate overall expenditures. This paper presents a comprehensive review of technical industrial standards and current offshore metocean survey methods for offshore wind energy applications, accompanied by a description of the intrinsic advantages and weaknesses of most important recording devices. The authors propose a methodology, articulated in five filtering steps enclosing most important requirements set by standards, to assess the suitability of a dataset for offshore wind applications. This approach is applied to a case study encompassing all measurement stations in the North Sea, as provided by the Copernicus Marine Service. Recognized for its strategic importance in offshore wind energy development, this region features a high density of measurement sensors. However, ensuring compliance with the requirements set by industry standards remains a significant challenge. The analysis shows that a significant number of stations fail to comply with the constraints set by regulatory bodies, highlighting the inadequacy of most traditional technologies that results in data scarcity in both time and space. Therefore, the need for alternative survey methods is called for, suggesting the use of innovative techniques leveraging artificial intelligence satellite observations to enhance wind data availability, crucial to match the growing demand of the offshore wind industry.