New Research Project Aims to Create More Accurate Wake Modelling for Offshore Wind

May 26, 2025, by Adrijana Buljan

A new research project – which gathers industry and academia partners from Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark – is said to enable a more accurate modelling of offshore wind energy wake effects in the North Sea.

The joint research project, named EuroWindWakes, launched in late 2024 with the aim of significantly increasing the accuracy of forecasts to facilitate optimised maritime spatial planning and allow reliable forecasting of power production. The project is set to run for three years.

EuroWindWakes industry partners include RWE, BP, EnBW and TotalEnergies, research institutes Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems (IWES), Technical University of Denmark, Delft University of Technology, Deutscher Wetterdienst, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, and consultancies and innovation companies Pondera Consult, EMD International, and DHI.

The focus of the project is the North Sea, where the world’s densest installation of offshore wind turbines is expected, with very evident wake effects and an impact on foreseeable power production, according to the project partners.

The EuroWindWakes team is working on models that will help minimise efficiency losses of offshore wind turbines through optimised wind farm planning.

“All three countries involved have already carried out large-scale wake research on smaller scales. EuroWindWakes reduces uncertainty in the assessment of long-distance wake effects on the North Sea scale, enabling optimal asset siting in applications like maritime spatial planning”, says Dr. Bernhard Stoevesandt, project coordinator at Fraunhofer IWES.

Current models used to calculate energy yields can depict wake effects with great uncertainty, and the project aims to reduce the inaccuracy of the predictions from 20-30 per cent to 10 per cent by improving and validating existing methods.

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This increased forecast accuracy will enable optimised transnational maritime spatial planning and a more accurate forecast of power production, the EuroWindWakes partners said in a press release on 26 May.

Anja Schönnebeck, national project coordinator at Pondera Consult, said: “The prediction of wake effects from neighboring wind farms on the energy yield of an offshore wind farm varies significantly depending on the chosen wake model. This variation introduces high uncertainties in the financial planning of offshore wind farms. The EuroWindWakes project aims to reduce these uncertainties, improving the reliability of energy yield predictions.”

The EuroWindWakes research project is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) in Germany, the Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Programme (EUDP) in Denmark and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) as part of the EU initiative Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CETP).