The impact of wind resource spatial variability on floating offshore wind farms finance

Wind resource availability determines the financial performance of wind farms as it is directly related to production. Offshore wind developers require great investments to design, build, operate and dismantle offshore wind farms. Furthermore, the investments in the offshore floating wind sector are expected to increase in the future. Because of that, the assessment of the variability of the investments, mainly because of the wind resource variability, seems to be a crucial step in the design methodology. Consequently, a flexible methodology for supporting offshore floating wind farm optimal location assessment is presented in this paper. The proposed methodology is focused on including the offshore wind resource variability and its influence on the power production of floating wind farms, as well as on the main financial indicators (internal rate of return, net present value, pay‐back period and cost of energy). The methodology is applied to the north coast of Spain, and it allows to identify the most promising sites for offshore wind farms deployment. Differences on the cost of energy up to 100% can be found in the area under study. The methodology proposed has been conceived to be site‐independent and applied at any spatial and time horizon. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.