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

国际能源署呼吁将温室气体/单位电力减少90%，以实现政府间气候变化专门委员会2C的目标。为了实现这一目标，司法管辖区必须利用其在当地占主导地位的可再生能源，而对于沿海居民来说，波浪能源是公开的选择。然而，很难获得对商业波能转换器(WEC)技术开发的资金和社会支持；政策尚未将环境问题转化为具有代表性的能源成本，而前往海外获取能源会为任何电力项目增加明确定义的风险。需要对通过部署WEC实现的好处进行详细的预测性评估，以平衡辩论。*拟议的Discovery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集合的基础上，这些工具用于：完成对BC海岸外任何位置的全面波浪评估，准确预测部署在该地点的任何WEC的电力输出，并计算将该电力完全整合到BC离网沿海社区的成本。这一能力在全球WEC社区中是完全独一无二的。*展望未来，将开发一种评估WEC农场产出的方法，即多个WEC在近距离(兆瓦级)运行。挑战是将灵活的WEC农场动态模型框架集成到相同的海岸波浪传播模型中，以预测广阔沿海地区的自然发生的波浪条件。与这类软件保持一致性，建议的计划输出可以立即转化为许多国家的波能商业化努力。*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，这与对实际WEC动力学的观察相矛盾。提出的程序将绕过这些缺陷，通过使用WCWI WEC模拟工具来充分表征预处理阶段的波-WEC相互作用。为了确保模拟研究涵盖所有环境条件，将对动力学算法进行改进，以显著提高计算速度。将开发数据挖掘算法，解析大量的预处理数据，以揭示环境条件和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浪建模软件SWAN中。最重要的是，新工具将利用申请人已经获得的一支波浪监测浮标舰队，根据在测试用例浮动障碍物周围收集的第一批现场数据进行验证。*由此产生的经过验证的WEC阵列建模工具将提供完成技术经济和环境评估的能力，这些评估是目前正在开发的兆瓦级WEC技术实施的先决条件。

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