Sites exploring prioritisation of offshore wind energy potential and mapping for wind farms installation: Iranian islands case studies.

Offshore Wind Energy (OWE) can be considered the Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) with a higher potential of newly installed power in marine areas more the following decades. As a primary phase of the Offshore Wind Farms (OWFs) development, focusing on the long-term Offshore Wind (OW) potential assessment and mapping is necessary to highlight the best areas for turbine generators installations. In this case, accurate assessment and mapping of long-term OWs can help pinpoint previously not considered marine areas. In this regard, the Iranian islands located in the Persian Gulf can be called one of these forgotten areas in dire need of energy supply due to their remoteness from the mainland. To these aims, the long-term Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications version 2 (MERRA-2) re-analysis dataset has been used to identify possible locations of the Offshore Wind Turbine Generators (OWTGs) installations. In particular, an OW classification based on the 40 years of monthly data and the last 10-years of hourly data highlighted the best areas for OWTGs potential installations in the 12 Iranian islands of the Persian Sea. The time-series method has been designed, tested, and developed to understand better and manage the OW potential and mapping of the Iranian islands decision-making process. Furthermore, the time-series method has been applied to the generated energy source based on the OW speed used in the Iranian islands. Finally, exploring results show Iranian islands, such as Kharg, Siri and Abu Musa islands, have attractive OWE potentials for OWTGs installations. • Offshore wind speed assessment and mapping using reanalysis data of the Persian Gulf. • Offshore wind analysis for wind turbines potential installations in the Iranian islands. • Time-series method designed, tested, and developed to the decision-making sites prioritisation. • Offshore wind farms site prioritisation using time-series data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]