A Spatial Analysis of the Potentials for Offshore Wind Farm Locations in the North Sea Region: Challenges and Opportunities Over the last decade, the accelerated transition towards cleaner means of producing energy has been clearly prioritised by the European Union through largescale planned deployment of wind farms in the North Sea. From a spatial planning perspective, this has not been a straightforward process, due to substantial spatial conflicts with the traditional users of the sea, especially with fisheries and protected areas. In this article, we examine the availability of offshore space for wind farm deployment, from a transnational perspective, while taking into account different options for the management of the maritime area through four scenarios. We applied a mixedmethod approach, combining expert knowledge and document analysis with the spatial visualisation of existing and future maritime spatial claims. Our calculations clearly indicate a low availability of suitable locations for offshore wind in the proximity of the shore and in shallow waters, even when considering its multiuse with fisheries and protected areas. However, the areas within 100 km from shore and with a water depth above xe2x80x93120 m attract greater opportunities for both single use (only offshore wind farms) and multiuse (mainly with fisheries), from an integrated planning perspective. On the other hand, the decrease of energy targets combined with sectoral planning result in clear limitations to suitable areas for offshore wind farms, indicating the necessity to consider areas with a water depth below xe2x80x93120 m and further than 100 km from shore. Therefore, despite the increased costs of maintenance and design adaptation, the multiuse of space can be a solution for more sustainable, stakeholderengaged and costeffective options in the energy deployment process. This paper identifies potential pathways, as well as challenges and opportunities for future offshore space management with the aim of achieving the 2050 renewable energy targets.

Ocean Mesh Grid: Applications in Shipping Modeling Many maritime transportation applications in operations research and analytics require computation of the shortest distance (or time) between two arbitrary positions on the ocean. In this paper, we show how xe2x80x9cobject meshingxe2x80x9d used in engineering applications can be applied to provide a network over the ocean that enables such computation. We present a short description of potential applications in shipping modeling as well as a comparison of computational accuracy with an established porttoport marine distance table. The numerical results suggest that a shortestpath algorithm applied to our network approximation of the ocean surface performs well for longer distances but relatively poorly for short voyages.