The future of European onshore wind energy potential: Detailed distribution and simulation of advanced turbine designs

Considering the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, onshore wind energy is certain to play a major role in future energy systems. This topic has received significant attention from the research community, producing many estimations of Europe's onshore wind potential for capacity and generation. Despite this focus, previous estimates appear to have underpredicted both the amount of available future wind capacity as well as its performance. Foremost in this regard is the common use of contemporary, or at least near-future, turbine designs which are not fitting for a far-future context. In response to this, an improved, transparent, and fully reproducible work flow is presented here, and applied to determine a future-oriented onshore wind energy potential for Europe. Within a scenario of turbine cost and design in 2050, 13.4 TW of capacity is found to be available, allowing for 34.3 PWh of average generation per year. By sorting the explicitly-placed potential installation locations by their expected generation cost, national relationships between cost and performance versus installed capacity are found, and it is also seen that all countries possess some potential for onshore wind energy generation below 4 ct€ kWh-1. Furthermore, it is unlikely for these costs to exceed 6 ct€ kWh-1 in any future capacity scenario.