Quantifying the Western Canadian marine energy resources and potential for large scale marine electricity production

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For Pacific Canada, wave energy is a predominant renewable energy resource that has long been targeted for commercial development. Despite the prevalence of this renewable energy resource and a legislated mandates to exploit clean energy sources, wave energy does not appear in the BC Integrated Resource Plan - the province's long term (2050) forecast for its electricity generation mix. This can be attributed to a lack of sufficiently resolved wave resource data for the entire Pacific Canada region, inability to identify coastal areas where marine energy can be prioritized over other competing interests and a void of techniques for predictive performance assessment of wave energy converter (WEC) farms installed in these areas. In the proposed program, knowledge, methods and computational tools will be developed that can be used to cross these knowledge barriers and facilitate the inclusion of wave energy in the Integrated Resource Plan process. A coupled wave and tidal current model of the full BC coast will be built using Simulating Waves Nearshore (SWAN) software. That model will be calibrated and validated using field measurements gathered from a new wave and current profiling devices that will be deployed at the North tip of Vancouver Island. Using "made-in-BC" commercial software, the team will execute computer simulation studies of different wave energy converters and build a refined assessment of these technologies' collective performance requirements. Merging knowledge of the natural resource characteristics and the technology requirements, the program will produce a draft specification of Marine Energy Suitability Areas on the BC coast. To estimate the cost of energy generated in these areas, new software will be developed that calculates farm power output and the cabling and connection costs. The models and data sets produced in the program will be transitioned to BC Hydro's Energy Planning division where they can be used to construct a detailed picture of BC's wave energy supply stacks.