The competition will enable modelers to access six validation cases from operational offshore wind farms in the North Sea, owned by OWA’s industry partners, to improve and strengthen their wake models.

According to the Carbon Trust, this open source, collaborative methodology will help progress the industry and allow more accurate energy yield predictions.

Different validation datasets are expected to span a range of wind conditions related to wind farm topology and wind climate characteristics, which will be used to strength-test wind resource predictions by comparing predictions to real-world examples.

It is anticipated the work will provide a universally agreed methodology for validating wake models.

“The continued improvement in wake modelling for the offshore wind industry has been a key theme under the OWA programme, and the value of assessing modelling against actual operational data is one of the most valuable exercises we can do as a group to support the offshore wind industry," said Liam Leahy, offshore wind manager at the Carbon Trust and OWA program manager for wakes and wind resource technical working group.

"Bringing together competition participants to allow them to assess their wake models will only improve the process in predicting energy estimates from offshore wind farms.”

OWA partners including the Scottish Government, EnBW, E.ON, Iberdrola, Innogy, Ørsted, Shell, SSE, Equinor and Vattenfall are funding the CENER-led competition.

The competition will run through several rounds through to December.