Modelling offshore wind potential between the north and Baltic sea
Faisal Bindakhil
My thesis compares wind energy potential and electricity pricing across the North Sea and Baltic Sea. Wind farms don’t just earn from how much they generate, but from the price their output captures, and that price falls as more wind comes online. I’m building a model that takes any country’s wind and market data and returns capture value, then layering that onto GIS site assessment alongside water depth and distance to coast. The aim is to show where wind is actually worth building, not just where it blows hardest.
Supervisor 1: Dr. Ruslan Galimov, RWE
Supervisor 2: Professor Adam Hawkes, Department of Chemical Engineering
Simulating Wave Breaking Loads on Offshore Wind Turbines and Comparing Against Design Solutions
Illias Ritsatakis-Syed
This project investigates wave breaking loads on floating offshore wind turbine structures using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Using the OpenFOAM solver olaDyMFlow, simulations of regular waves interacting with a floating cylinder are conducted across multiple wave conditions and domain configurations. Results are compared against physical laboratory data to validate the numerical approach and assess current industry design standards, contributing to safer and more cost-effective offshore wind turbine design.
Supervisor 1: Dr. Marios Christou, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Whole-Life Carbon Assessment of Wind Energy and Integration in the UK’s Energy System Modelling Environment (ESME)
Jade Gibon
In the UK’s Energy System Modelling Environment (ESME), wind power is treated as zero-carbon, with the model only capturing operational emissions and ignoring the embodied carbon associated with manufacturing, transport, installation, and end-of-life. This project builds life-cycle assessments in SimaPro using the ecoinvent database for three modern Vestas turbines: one onshore, one fixed-bottom offshore, and one floating offshore, to derive per-kWh and per-kW carbon intensities. The project then feeds these carbon intensities into Energy Systems Catapult’s ESME to quantify how accounting for embodied carbon reshapes the cost-optimal UK energy mix and the trade-off between building more wind and the emissions locked into that build across net-zero scenarios.
Supervisor 1: Benjamin Tatlock, Energy Systems Catapult
Supervisor 2: Dr. Jasmin Cooper, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Under What Conditions Does Hydrogen Production Improve Offshore Wind Profitability? A UK Techno-Economic Case Study
Marina Crespo Delgado
The UK offshore wind sector is currently shielded by subsidy support, but developers face growing uncertainty over what happens post-CfD, with rising exposure to volatile prices and merchant risk. Green hydrogen, produced by pairing offshore wind with electrolysis, has been proposed as a way to diversify revenue, though the conditions under which this holds remain unclear. This project develops a techno-economic model comparing wind-only generation against hybrid onshore/offshore electrolysis configurations, applied to a UK case study. Through mixed-integer optimisation across market scenarios, it identifies price and cost combinations improving developer profitability relative to wind alone.
Supervisor 1: Dr. Elina Spyrou, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Supervisor 2: Philipp Mouline, Vattenfall
Optimising Revenue Contracting for Offshore Wind Portfolios
Markos Chandras
Withdrawal of government subsidies and inflated supply chain costs have driven a series of offshore wind auction failures across Europe. This research project assesses the extent to which revenue contracting optimisation of a multi-asset offshore wind portfolio can enhance profitability for a risk-averse developer in a project finance setting. It develops a stochastic profitability evaluation approach that traces the bankability risk and assesses how contracting types and parameters affect portfolio efficiency.
Supervisor 1: Professor Richard Green, Imperial Business School
Supervisor 2: Dr. Iain Staffell, Centre for Environmental Policy