“Offshore wind has become a global opportunity, and it is rapidly expanding to new and vastly different markets. We help clients screen and prioritize markets, identify viable offshore wind sites, and understand the regulatory pathway to securing sites and the economic route-to-market.”
Craig Brown, Principal Consultant and Market Studies Lead, OWC
OWC has a dedicated and experienced market studies team that focuses on early-market studies, including site- identification and characterisation, market regulations, and route-to-market strategy.
Service Offerings
Market Screening
OWC works with global clients to evaluate, screen, and identify viable markets for offshore wind deployment. We base market screening and evaluation on customized criteria for each client’s preferences and risk appetite, as well as necessary site conditions for offshore wind technologies. Our market screening and identification process provides quantitative and qualitative evaluation of:
- Resource potential and energy yield
- Power market fundamentals
- Existing infrastructure
- Cost-competitiveness of offshore wind
- Power market structure
- Seabed leasing and offshore tendering
- Policy and regulations
- Route-to-market for power sales
Site Identification and Characterisation
OWC’s GIS specialists and multi-discipline engineers identify viable sites for offshore wind developments globally. We then assess the physical characteristics of the sites and advise on the engineering and cost of energy implications. Our team has crafted an effective and efficient process of site identification and characterization. We integrate clients into the process of deciding site selection criteria, assessing risk appetite, deciding minimum capacity of wind farm, scoring hard and soft constraints, and ranking sites based on custom criteria. For site ID and characterization studies, we routinely provide our clients with:
- Resource mapping (wind and bathymetry)
- Constraints layering (environmental and social, infrastructure, shipping density, etc.)
- Defining viable areas of interest
- Infrastructure requirements
- Transmission design
- Grid connection requirements
- Supply chain and logistics studies
- Geotechnical conditions
- Seafloor morphology
- Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE)
Regulatory and Lease Auction Support
OWC’s global network of offices helps us provide detailed market insight from our local teams. We advise clients in pre-seabed lease / pre-auction markets and can help navigate the local requirements and procedures for early-stage offshore energy development. This includes assessment of key requirements for:
- Seabed leasing
- Site control
- Concessions
- Permits
- Authorizations
- Filing
Route-to-market Strategy
We assess the regulatory requirements, economic and financial opportunities and risks to selling power or power-to-x opportunities in different market structures. We can offer our clients our knowledge and analysis, such as:
- Market structure
- Power sales regulations and requirements
- Power generation mix
- Power prices
- Subsidies
- Competitive cost of energy assessment
Example of our experience OWC supported ORE Catapult’s “Floating Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence” in developing a market study that projects future global floating wind opportunities, identifying 54 territories as potential short-term or long-term floating wind markets from screening over 240 territories.
As part of the market study, OWC assessed territories initially against minimum technical thresholds to detect market readiness for floating offshore wind: coastal access, offshore wind resources and bathymetry, and social economic filters.
The resulting 54 territories were then screened for their short-term or long-term readiness as a floating offshore wind market, along 11 custom-developed criteria spanning the following categories:
- Technical resource and policy drivers
- Commercial investment landscape
- Floating offshore wind market facilitators
Read more on OWC with ORE Catapult’s market study: Floating Offshore Wind International Market Opportunities.