As explained in the overview, the constraints chosen were: any other offshore wind activity, oil and gas wells, as well as fields.
A definition query was set for the oil and gas field shapefile, in order to remove oil/gas fields which are no longer being used, since in the future these areas could be used for other purposes. The oil and gas well attribute data showed that they were all still operational, therefore it was all used. All of the wind activity data was used, even the sites whose status was ‘planned’, since they could potentially be operational in the future. 1 nautical-mile (~1.85 km) buffers were created around the defined well, field, and wind activity data (separately). The value chosen in order to create the buffers was completely arbitrary, since the literature does not provide any suggestions on a minimum distance between offshore activities.
The new buffer layers were then merged individually using the Union geoprocessing tool with a shapefile of the UK continental shelf (the ‘study area’) I created by tracing the outline of an offshore geology shapefile. New polygons created outside of the ‘study area’ after the union were removed and each new layer was converted into a raster (individually). The cell size was chosen to be 6500, due to the fact that the wind speed raster was assigned this value. Using the Reclassify tool, the values of these rasters were changed so that the cells containing wells/fields/wind farms were 0 and the rest of the study are was 1 (Boolean rasters) (Figures 6-8 below).
Figure 6: Oil and gas fields in the UK continental shelf (Raster)
Figure 7: The oil and gas wells in the UK Continental Shelf
Figure 8: The offshore wind energy activities on the UK continental shelf (Raster)
After the MCE model was completed and the final rasters (both equal and weighted) created, the Raster Calculator was used in order to produce a final raster showing the sites which showed the most suitability for potential wind energy production taking into account these constraints (See Results section).