  This paper provides a detailed account of the impact of different offshore
wind siting strategies on the design of the European power system. To this end,
a two-stage method is proposed. In the first stage, a highly-granular siting
problem identifies a suitable set of sites where offshore wind plants could be
deployed according to a pre-specified criterion. Two siting schemes are
analysed and compared within a realistic case study. These schemes essentially
select a pre-specified number of sites so as to maximise their aggregate power
output and their spatiotemporal complementarity, respectively. In addition, two
variants of these siting schemes are provided, wherein the number of sites to
be selected is specified on a country-by-country basis rather than Europe-wide.
In the second stage, the subset of previously identified sites is passed to a
capacity expansion planning (CEP) framework that sizes the power generation,
transmission and storage assets that should be deployed and operated in order
to satisfy pre-specified electricity demand levels at minimum cost. Results
show that the complementarity-based siting criterion leads to system designs
which are up to 5% cheaper than the ones relying the power output-based
criterion when offshore wind plants are deployed with no consideration for
country-based deployment targets. On the contrary, the power output-based
scheme leads to system designs which are consistently 2% cheaper than the ones
leveraging the complementarity-based siting strategy when such constraints are
enforced. The robustness of the results is supported by a sensitivity analysis
on offshore wind capital expenditure and inter-annual weather variability,
respectively.
