Abstract
The North Sea has become a focus of renewable energy production. In the Esbjerg Declaration four European countries pledged just recently to install a total combined capacity of at least 150GW by 2050 in the North Sea in order to help reach the EU's 40% renewable target. As the North Sea is also a complex ecosystem that is strongly driven by hydrodynamical features such as tidal fronts and seasonal stratification, these large OWFs can be expected to impact the ecosystem dynamics in the area. By using numerical models, we investigated the effects that an extensive offshore energy development would have on the physical conditions and the ecosystem of the southern North Sea. Our results show that the ongoing OWF developments can have a substantial impact on the structuring of coastal marine ecosystems.
Speaker: Ute Daewel (Helmholtz-Zentrum hereon GmbH)
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