The costs of offshore wind are decreasing rapidly. However, there is a need to better understand the key drivers behind these cost reductions. New environmental regulations, economic policies, technological advancements and financing structures have resulted in a set of relationships that need to be considered in order to define risks and profitability for the next generation of offshore wind farms. We use an industry-leading offshore wind cost modelling tool which integrates site characteristics, technology specificities and financial modelling expertise and apply state-of-art global sensitivity analysis methods for different classes of offshore wind farms, ranking the contribution of around 150 input parameters that influence the cost of offshore wind development. We show that the top 5 parameters when building an offshore wind investment business case are the wind speed, target equity rate of return, turbine costs, drilling costs and debt service coverage ratio. The contribution of this paper can help guide additional efforts towards reducing the uncertainty of those key parameters to decrease costs and provide a framework to choose global sensitivity analysis techniques for offshore wind techno-economic models.

中文翻译：

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海上风电成本建模的全局敏感性分析

海上风电的成本正在迅速下降。但是，需要更好地了解这些成本降低背后的关键驱动因素。新的环境法规、经济政策、技术进步和融资结构产生了一系列需要考虑的关系，以便为下一代海上风电场定义风险和盈利能力。我们使用行业领先的海上风电成本建模工具，该工具集成了场地特征、技术特性和财务建模专业知识，并对不同类别的海上风电场应用最先进的全球敏感性分析方法，对约 150 个输入参数的贡献进行排名影响海上风电开发成本。我们表明，构建海上风电投资业务案例时的前 5 个参数是风速、目标权益回报率、涡轮机成本、钻井成本和偿债覆盖率。本文的贡献有助于指导进一步努力减少这些关键参数的不确定性以降低成本，并提供一个框架来选择海上风电技术经济模型的全球敏感性分析技术。