WindHouse

Windhouse – a tool for localisation of offshore wind farms

In 2023, the Norwegian Government expressed an ambition of allocating ocean areas for development of offshore windfarms with a total capacity of 30,000 MW within 2040. Where should these windfarms be located?

When The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) in April 2023 appointed new areas to be assessed for offshore wind development, the selection was assisted by a so-called multicriteria decision analysis – a mathematical model that assembles the conflicting location criteria and computes a suitability index that ranks the candidate locations.

A multicriteria decision analysis attempts to be objective, by accounting for all considerations that can be quantified. Nevertheless, the weighting of the criteria is a subjective exercise that may give different results. How does the suitability index map vary with the choices of criteria weighting?

Windhouse is a web-based software that makes the multicriteria decision analysis transparent and dynamic, as it:

• offers a tool for experimenting with different criteria weightings and visualising the results
• allows to include of new datasets as they become available, such as data about future scenarios and other information that stakeholders find relevant and missing

This makes it possible to account for e.g. changes in the wind resources due to climate change, while existing analyses are only based on data representing the current situation.

The multicriterion decision analysis tool of Windhouse is based on a research paper by Ida Marie Solbrekke and Asgeir Sorteberg published in Wind Energy.