The Ecology scenario: wind capacity redistributed to protect Natura 2000 habitat. Magazine design: Caterina Dubini & Martina Bianchini.
A linear-optimization engine that turns one of the world's most contested seas into defensible trade-off scenarios by balancing offshore resource generation, environmental considerations, and the marine spatial plans of seven countries.
The Ecology scenario: wind capacity redistributed to protect Natura 2000 habitat. Magazine design: Caterina Dubini & Martina Bianchini.
The North Sea is one of the most contested seas in the world. There are seven different countries with territory in the sea, each of which has its own spatial plan for their EEZs; on top of that the EU has set various energy and environmental targets.
The question the project set out to answer was simple: can we initiate discussion between all the actors within the North Sea? The solution for us was to provide a transparent model that let policymakers see, in hard numbers, what each priority costs the others.
We framed the sea as a linear optimization problem. The study area was divided into candidate zones, each of which could be assigned to various technologies. An objective function weighed energy yield, ecological value, food production, and economic considerations against a set of hard constraints for areas that could not be developed (i.e., shipping routes, protected nature or fishing sites, military zones, etc).
The whole thing was built in open-source Python, with PuLP to express the model and HiGHS as the solver, using data formatted with GeoPandas and rasterio to harmonize seven countries' worth of data into one standardized dataset.
The North C Neutral engine end to end: geospatial and technology inputs are precomputed into a metric library, then a mixed-integer solver searches that library against each stakeholder's goals and constraints to return an optimal marine configuration. Magazine design: Caterina Dubini & Martina Bianchini.
The supply-chain roadmap to 300 GW: the model phases the build-out across the basin from 2028 to 2050, checking that ports, installation vessels, and grid connections can keep pace with each step. Magazine design: Caterina Dubini & Martina Bianchini.
The model can produce an infinite number of scenarios, accounting for any goals or restraints any stakeholder has. For the sake of a public-facing exhibit with the intention of giving non-technical stakeholders a way to explore the ocean, we produced four contrasting scenarios: Business-as-usual, Energy focused, Fishery focused, and Ecology focused. Each had a full set of comparable metrics, allowing the quantification of trade-offs. For example, in an ecological protection scenario, the levelized cost of energy (the per-watt price of producing the energy) increased, but the ecological index measurably increased and fishing grounds were preserved.
The Balanced Cooperation scenario: the model trades wind-farm placement against emissions to balance economic cost and climate impact, one of the four contrasting outputs we produced. Magazine design: Caterina Dubini & Martina Bianchini.