Accelerating the Commercialization of Wave Energy Converters Using Innovative Computational Performance Assessment

国际能源署呼吁将单位电力的温室气体排放量减少90%，以达到政府间气候变化专门委员会设定的2°C的目标。为了实现这一目标，各司法管辖区必须充分利用其主要的本地可再生能源，而对于沿海地区的居民来说，波浪能是一个明显的选择。然而，商业波浪能转换器（WEC）技术开发的资金和社会支持难以获得；政策并没有将环境问题转化为具有代表性的能源成本，而出海获取能源给任何电力项目都增加了明显的风险。需要对通过WEC部署实现的效益进行详细的预测评估，以平衡争论。***建议的发现计划建立在UVic西海岸波浪倡议（WCWI）的国际公认的基础设施和计算工具的基础上，用于：完成BC省沿海任何地点的综合波浪评估，准确预测部署在该地点的任何WEC的功率输出，并计算将该功率完全整合到BC省离网沿海社区的成本。这种能力在全球WEC社区中完全是独一无二的。***今后，将开发一种评估WEC农场产量的方法，即多个近距离运行的WEC农场（兆瓦级）。挑战在于将灵活的WEC农场动态模型框架整合到相同的沿海波传播模型中，该模型依赖于预测广阔沿海地区自然发生的波浪条件。与此类软件保持一致，建议的程序输出可以立即转化为许多国家波浪能商业化努力。WEC阵列建模是一个新兴领域，现有技术依赖于对波-WEC相互作用的全面假设，这与实际WEC动力学的观察结果相矛盾。所提出的程序将通过使用WCWI WEC模拟工具在预处理阶段充分表征波-WEC相互作用来规避这些缺陷。为了确保模拟研究跨越所有环境条件，将对动态算法进行增强，以显着提高计算速度。将开发数据挖掘算法，解析大量预处理数据，以揭示环境条件与WEC动态之间的最小函数关系集，这些关系可以编码到海岸波建模软件SWAN中。最重要的是，新工具将使用申请人已经获得的一系列波浪监测浮标，根据测试用例浮动障碍周围收集的首次现场数据进行验证。***最终验证的WEC阵列建模工具将提供完成技术经济和环境评估的能力，这是目前正在开发的WEC技术的兆瓦级实施的先决条件。

The International Energy Agency has called for a 90% reduction in GHG/unit electricity to meet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2°C target. To achieve this goal, jurisdictions must capitalize on their predominant local renewable, and for coastal populations wave energy is the overt option. Yet, financial and social support for commercial Wave Energy Converter (WEC) technology development is difficult to acquire; policy has not translated environmental concerns into representative energy costs, and going offshore to acquire energy adds well-defined risks to any power project. Detailed predictive assessments of the benefits realized through WEC deployments are needed to balance debates. ***The proposed Discovery program builds on an internationally recognized assembly of infrastructure and computational tools at the UVic West Coast Wave Initiative (WCWI) that are used to: complete comprehensive wave assessments for any location off the BC coast, accurately predict the power output from any WEC deployed at that site and calculate the cost of fully integrating that power into a BC off-grid coastal community. This capacity is entirely unique in the global WEC community.***Moving forward, a means of assessing the output of WEC farms, multiple WECs operating in close proximity (MW scale), will be developed. The challenge is to integrate a flexible WEC farm dynamic model framework within the same coastal wave propagation models relied on to forecast the naturally occurring wave conditions across broad coastal regions. Maintaining consistency with such software, the proposed program outputs can be immediately translated into numerous national wave energy commercialization efforts.***WEC array modeling is a nascent field and existing techniques rely on sweeping assumptions on the wave-WEC interaction that contradict observations on actual WEC dynamics. The proposed program will circumvent these flaws by using the WCWI WEC simulation tools to fully characterize the wave-WEC interaction in a pre-processing stage. To ensure that simulation studies span the full range of environmental conditions, enhancements to dynamics algorithms will be made that significantly improve computational speed. Data mining algorithms will be developed that parse the wealth of pre-processed data to reveal the minimal set of functional relationships between the environmental conditions and the WEC dynamics that can be coded into the coastal wave modeling software SWAN. Most importantly, the new tool will be validated against first-of-its-kind field data collected around a test case floating obstacle using a fleet of wave monitoring buoys already acquired by the applicant.***The resulting validated WEC array modeling tool will provide the capacity to complete the techno-economic and environmental assessments that are the pre-requisite to MW scale implementations of WEC technology being developed today.