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Offshore wind farms are great options for addressing the world's energy and climate change challenges, as well as meeting rising energy demand while taking environmental and economic impacts into account. Floating wind turbines, in specific, depict the next horizon in the sustainable renewable energy industry. In this study, a life-cycle cost analysis for floating offshore wind turbines is developed by combining the most recent data and parametric formulas from databases and relevant papers. The cost analysis models focused on cost minimization with special emphasis on Operation and Maintenance Cost (OPEX), Decommissioning Cost (DECOM), and Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), which are important factors in wind power economy. Given that floating wind energy is still developing, the presented scenarios should be beneficial in making future decisions. The cost analysis scenarios include on-site and off-site maintenance scenarios for OPEX. In addition, four alternative scenarios for DECOM have been examined: mechanical recycling, mechanical-incineration, incineration processes, and landfill. According to the findings of these scenarios, OPEX varies from 16.89 to 19.93 £/MWh and DECOM between 3.47 and 3.65 £/MWh, whilst the total LCOE varied from 50.67 to 66.73 £/MWh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most crucial solutions to the issues of climate change and global warming is clean energy. However, creating intelligent, resilient, and sustainable systems is a worldwide problem, particularly for grid-connected Renewable Energy Systems (RES). Therefore, it is important to investigate how prospective changes in electricity pricing, renewable energy sources, and load demand could affect system performance during the projects. This paper presents a techno-economic analysis of a grid-connected wind energy system located in the Al-Jouf region in Saudi Arabia. To this end, the potential of renewable energy sources was assessed using Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Electric Renewables (HOMER) software, that also carried out the technical and economic study utilizing multi-year parameters. The novelty of this study is that it is the first-ever investigation of a grid-connected wind farm system in Saudi Arabia that considers the impact of multi-year parameters such as the grid price, system fixed operation, maintenance cost, and the AC electric load. The results showed that the proposed system in the chosen area recorded a very low Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) of around 0.06 USD/kWh compared to other systems. Also, running a multi-year model showed that the considered parameters have an impact on the system's performance, and this reflects the importance of considering these parameters in any such system that will increase the study's accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]