Assessment of the Offshore Wind Potential of the Colombian Caribbean Sea in Scenarios of Climate Variability and Climate Change.

In Colombia, hydropower is a major component of the region’s energy supply, providing around 65% of the total demand. Despite the considerable efforts to increase the hydropower share in the country with large and small projects, climate variability, and more specifically the interannual variability associated with ENSO, imposes a challenge for the robustness of the national energy supply. El Niño events usually generate negative anomalies of precipitation in the region, increasing the vulnerability of the energy supply chain, sometimes resulting in energy rationing alerts. The offshore wind potential offers the possibility of expanding renewable energy sources and diversifying the generation portfolio globally. In Colombia, offshore wind energy could become, in the future, one of the main sources of electricity generation. We estimate the offshore wind potential in the Colombian Caribbean Sea, its annual cycle and its potential relationship with hydropower, assessing energy complementarity, and its variability as a response to ENSO forcing and other sources of interannual variability. In addition to the projections of energy generation under present climate conditions, we assess the offshore potential under 21st-century climate projections. The offshore potential work is estimated using data from various sources such as satellite wind retrievals, NCEP and ECMWF reanalysis, Global Climate Models, and records from weather stations. The regional wind power density and the generation efficiency was estimated considering 6MW wind turbines, and finally, the results were contrasted using the same data sources for the already existing Hywind Scotland floating wind farm.