On the Potential Impact of Climate Change on Design of Offshore Wind Turbines

A reliability-based approach for offshore wind turbine design is proposed to account for climate change of metocean conditions and uncertainty related to the estimates of future extreme weather and other metocean parameters. The impact of expected wave and wind climate change on OWT design is demonstrated for monopile-supported OWTs with site-specific metocean conditions. The presented examples show consequences of climate change for the fore-aft bending failure probability of bottom-fixed support structure. To maintain the safety level in the current IEC-61400 based-design, the safety factors should be increased by 30–35 % if the fore-aft total bending moment increases by 35%, due to climate change-related extreme weather. However, it should be noted that the ability to adopt climate change adaptation strategies may imply that the current practice of designing of OWTs may require less rigorous changes in the future. The impact of this adaptation and uncertainty associated with it should be accounted for.