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

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The International Energy Agency has called for a 90% reduction in GHG/unit electricity to meet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2C 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.