Overview:

In order to examine possible sites around the UK that could be used for offshore wind power generation, I decided to create Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) model. For this, factors and constraints need to be determined.

Factors are elements of the environment which have known influence on where offshore wind farms could be built. For the purposes of this simple analysis (and due to limited data being available), the three factors chosen were: depth (metres), distance from the coast (nautical miles), and wind speed (metres per second).

Constraints are therefore the activities in the UK continental shelf (Economic Exclusion Zone) that prevent any wind energy generation to take place in the area surrounding them. For this project, the constraints were: oil and gas fields and wells around the UK, and other offshore wind energy related activities (active wind farms, wind farms under construction, consented areas for future development).

Subsequently, the factors would need to be normalised (so as to be comparable, using the Fuzzy Membership tool) and their relative importance weighted, using the analytical hierarchal approach (AHP) with the help of this website.

With the weighted influence values determined, the normalised factor rasters would be overlaid using the Weighted Sum tool, which allows us to visualise the areas around the UK which are potentially suitable for wind power generation.

Finally, a sensitivity analysis was carried out, which will give an idea of how sensitive the results are to the weights assigned to each factor in determining the distribution of potential sites.