Threat and risk scenarios for Offshore wind farms and an approach to their assessment

Abstract

Offshore wind farms in the German North and Baltic Seas have a key role to play in the context of the shift towards renewable energy and in securing electricity supplies in the future. At the same time, however, shipping routes in the North and Baltic Seas are among the busiest in the world, wind farms are increasingly being operated unmanned and conflicts increasingly involve a hybrid element. From these constellations and competing interests, various risk and threat scenarios emerge. By means of a survey among experts from offshore wind industry, this paper first captures the subjective assessment of the risk situation in order to subsequently develop an approach for their evaluation. The paper uses Bayesian networks in order to enable a risk assessment also under inclusion of uncertain parameters.