Oxford fluids researchers to help predict ecological impacts of future offshore wind farms

The Ecological Effects of Floating Offshore Wind (ECOFlow) programme aims to enhance understanding of how marine ecosystems will respond to the planned large-scale expansion of floating offshore wind (FLOW) infrastructure in UK waters over the next decade. Two new research projects, named ‘EQUIFy’ (led by Prof. Matthew Palmer, Plymouth Marine Laboratory) and ‘FrontLine’ (led by Prof. Stephen Votier, Heriot-Watt University) have been selected by the ECOFlow programme to provide scientific evidence to inform the UK government’s policy and decision making on future offshore wind.

Three Oxford researchers, Dr Takafumi Nishino, Dr Christopher Vogel and Dr Emma Edwards from the Environmental Fluid Mechanics group, will contribute to the EQUIFy project by providing their expertise in wind farm aerodynamics and floating turbine designs. Working together with researchers from the University of Plymouth, the team will introduce a novel multiscale-coupled approach to the modelling of FLOW farms, parameterising their aerodynamic and hydrodynamic impacts as a loss of momentum and increase of turbulence in the air and sea water. The resulting FLOW models will be implemented, in collaboration with the UK Met Office and Plymouth Marine Laboratory, into UK regional-scale coupled simulations of the atmosphere, ocean circulation, waves and biogeochemistry, to help predict ecological and meteorological impacts of large-scale FLOW deployment.

Dr Takafumi Nishino, Senior Research Associate at Oxford and co-lead of the EQUIFy work package on FLOW parameterisation, says, “The rapid expansion of offshore wind farms planned in the UK means that their potential impacts on regional weather and marine ecosystems need to be assessed urgently, but the underlying fluid mechanics of large FLOW farms are complicated and their multiscale interactions with the atmosphere and ocean are only starting to be understood. In EQUIFy we will aim to bridge the gap between engineering design optimisation and environmental impact assessment of large FLOW farms, to help predict an efficient and environmentally acceptable form of future offshore wind.”

Dr Ségolène Berthou, Science Manager for Regional Coupled Systems at the UK Met Office and project partner of EQUIFy, adds, “The new FLOW parameterisation scheme proposed in EQUIFy will be highly valuable to our Regional Environmental Prediction system, which couples together km-scale atmosphere, land, ocean and wave models for both weather forecasting and climate applications. We are delighted to continue our collaborative relationship with the Oxford wind energy team and Plymouth Marine Laboratory through this new project. It is an essential partnership to enhance our understanding of the impacts of future offshore wind farms.”