Monitoring Offshore Wind Energy Use in Europe–Offshore∼WMEP

Offshore wind energy use is commonly suggested to play an important role in future electricity supply. However, long-term experience with thousands of onshore wind turbines explicitly hint on possible barriers for a safe, efficient, economic and user friendly supply relying on offshore wind energy. A national German programme shall on the one hand support the wind energy sector improving technology and O&M procedures towards higher reliability and availability, and on the other hand monitor the development in terms of techniques, electricity yields and cost. In the following, this scientific monitoring programme, the ‘Offshore∼WMEP’, is presented. The actual challenge of this programme is to convince numerous players with diverse points of interest to collaborate in gathering data and providing it for a jointly utilized database.