Can offshore wind energy help to attain carbon neutrality amid climate change? A GIS-MCDM based analysis to unravel the facts using CORDEX-SA

Harnessing offshore wind energy helps to achieve carbon neutrality. However, the availability of wind resources is sensitive to climate change and also depends on the available foundation technologies of wind turbines. Investigating annual energy production (AEP) and CO2 equivalent emission avoidance using offshore wind farms helps to make appropriate energy strategies. This study uses an ensemble developed using CORDEX-South Asia regional climate models by assigning weights derived from the CRITIC multi-criteria technique to estimate AEP under two representative concentration pathways (RCP), i.e., RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios in the North Indian Ocean. To account for the impact of climate change, inter and intra-annual variations in the wind power density (WPD), capacity factor (CF), and AEP are estimated. Estimates based on the feasibility of foundation technology show that the cumulative AEP obtained from the 240 MW wind farm in historic, near- and far-future scenarios are 357.91 TWh, 808.6 TWh, and 4888.78 TWh, respectively. In the near future, harnessing offshore wind energy can reduce CO2 emissions by 4500 million tons annually. The findings of this study suggest that harnessing offshore wind energy by installing farms within the study area could help in the massive reduction of CO2 emissions leading to carbon neutrality.