Competing Use Analysis for Offshore Renewables and Subsea Cables

Demand for abundant and diverse resources in the oceans is growing, necessitating marine spatial planning. To inform development of Marine Hydrokinetic (MHK) and Offshore Wind (OSW) resources, the Department of Energy (DOE) has asked NREL to identify the competing uses areas between promising MHK/OSW sites and submarine power and telecommunications cables. The first step in this work is to identify and quantify the overlap between the MHK/OSW resource availability and existing cable routes. The analysis is done in terms of resource area because the task of quantifying actual impacts on available resource is a non-trivial undertaking that involves subjective decisions of identifying resource opportunities. Quantifying overlap in-terms of resource area?on the other hand?is significantly more straight forward, and useful to marine spatial planners. This dataset of polygons describes recommended setback areas from submarine cables for marine renewable energy Development. Two archive files are provided:

  1. NREL Cables Setback-Polygons.zip contains the following GeoJSON files:

1.a. cables_100ft.geojson: The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR 585.301) specifies that the legal right of way for submarine cables is 100 ft (~30 meters) to either side of the cable (i.e., 200 ft wide).

1.b. cables_2z.geojson: The International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) of the North American Submarine Cable Association (NASCA) recommends setback distances for new facilities as the maximum of 500 m or twice the bottom depth (2z), per ICPC Recommendation 13 No. 2 (Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council IV 2014). For depths 250 m, 2 * depth is to be used.

1.c. cables_3z.geojson: The ICPC of NASCA recommends setback distances for new cables as the maximum of 500 m or three times the bottom depth (3z), per ICPC Recommendation 2 No. 10 (Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council IV 2014). So for depths 167 m, 3 * depth is to be used.

  1. NREL Submarine Cable Analysis Code Data Presentations.zip contains all files (code, data, README, etc) from release 0.1 of this Github repository for possibly regenerating the product as submarine cable configurations change: https://github.com/ecoquants/nrel-cables.

For more details, please see the link to the full report for which this data product is a supplemental output:

Submarine Cable Analysis for U.S. Marine Renewable Energy Development by Ben Best and Levi Kilcher National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Data e Risorse

Campo Valore
DOI 10.15473/1561978
accessLevel public
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identifier https://data.openei.org/submissions/4018
issued 2019-08-29T06:00:00Z
landingPage https://mhkdr.openei.org/submissions/314
license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
modified 2020-06-01T21:57:15Z
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programCode {019:010,019:009}
projectLead Hoyt Battey
projectNumber FY17 AOP 2140401
projectTitle Competing Use Analysis for Offshore Renewables and Subsea Cables
publisher National Renewable Energy Laboratory
resource-type Dataset
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  • AmeriGEOSS
  • National Provider
  • North America
Tag
  • amerigeo
  • amerigeoss
  • ckan
  • competing-use-analysis
  • energy
  • geo
  • geojson
  • geoss
  • hydrokinetic
  • marine
  • mhk
  • modeling
  • national
  • north-america
  • nrel
  • offshore
  • polygons
  • power
  • renewable-energy
  • renewables
  • setbacks
  • submarine-cable-analysis
  • submarine-cables
  • subsea-cables
  • technology-study
  • united-states
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license_id cc-by
license_title Creative Commons Attribution
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maintainer Ben Best
maintainer_email ben@ecoquants.com
metadata_created 2025-11-22T03:27:00.106616
metadata_modified 2025-11-22T03:27:00.106620
notes Demand for abundant and diverse resources in the oceans is growing, necessitating marine spatial planning. To inform development of Marine Hydrokinetic (MHK) and Offshore Wind (OSW) resources, the Department of Energy (DOE) has asked NREL to identify the competing uses areas between promising MHK/OSW sites and submarine power and telecommunications cables. The first step in this work is to identify and quantify the overlap between the MHK/OSW resource availability and existing cable routes. The analysis is done in terms of resource area because the task of quantifying actual impacts on available resource is a non-trivial undertaking that involves subjective decisions of identifying resource opportunities. Quantifying overlap in-terms of resource area?on the other hand?is significantly more straight forward, and useful to marine spatial planners. This dataset of polygons describes recommended setback areas from submarine cables for marine renewable energy Development. Two archive files are provided: 1. NREL Cables Setback-Polygons.zip contains the following GeoJSON files: 1.a. cables_100ft.geojson: The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR 585.301) specifies that the legal right of way for submarine cables is 100 ft (~30 meters) to either side of the cable (i.e., 200 ft wide). 1.b. cables_2z.geojson: The International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) of the North American Submarine Cable Association (NASCA) recommends setback distances for new facilities as the maximum of 500 m or twice the bottom depth (2z), per ICPC Recommendation 13 No. 2 (Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council IV 2014). For depths 250 m, 2 * depth is to be used. 1.c. cables_3z.geojson: The ICPC of NASCA recommends setback distances for new cables as the maximum of 500 m or three times the bottom depth (3z), per ICPC Recommendation 2 No. 10 (Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council IV 2014). So for depths 167 m, 3 * depth is to be used. 2. NREL Submarine Cable Analysis Code Data Presentations.zip contains all files (code, data, README, etc) from release 0.1 of this Github repository for possibly regenerating the product as submarine cable configurations change: https://github.com/ecoquants/nrel-cables. For more details, please see the link to the full report for which this data product is a supplemental output: Submarine Cable Analysis for U.S. Marine Renewable Energy Development by Ben Best and Levi Kilcher National Renewable Energy Laboratory
num_resources 3
num_tags 26
title Competing Use Analysis for Offshore Renewables and Subsea Cables