Assessing the Effectiveness of a Novel WEC Concept as a Co-Located Solution for Offshore Wind Farms

Abstract

The combined exploitation of wave and offshore wind energy resources is expected to improve the cost competitiveness of the wave energy industry as a result of shared capital and operational costs. In this context, the objective of this work is to explore the potential benefits of co-locating CECO, an innovative wave energy converter, with the commercial WindFloat Atlantic wind farm, located on the northern coast of Portugal. For this purpose, the performance of the combined farm was assessed in terms of energy production, power smoothing and levelised cost of energy (LCoE). Overall, the co-located farm would increase the annual energy production by approximately 19% in comparison with the stand-alone wind farm. However, the benefits in terms of power output smoothing would be negligible due to the strong seasonal behaviour of the wave resource in the area of study. Finally, the LCoE of the co-located farm would be drastically reduced in comparison with the stand-alone wave farm, presenting a value of 0.115 per USD/kWh, which is similar to the levels of the offshore wind industry as of five years ago. Consequently, it becomes apparent that CECO could progress more rapidly towards commercialisation when combined with offshore wind farms.

An Integrated Approach to Assessing the Wave Potential for the Energy Supply of Ports: A Case Study

“…On the other hand, Table 6 presents the results of the annual energy production (E t ), capacity factor (C f ) and capture width ratio (CWR) for the optimised devices. As expected, oCECO presents the best performance indicators, especially in terms of annual energy production (1.33 GWh) and CWR (49%), which are in good agreement with the results obtained in previous works [93,95]. For the remaining WECs, F-2HB and F-OWC perform relatively well in Area I with the annual energy production and CWR exceeding 0.8 GWh and 22%, respectively.…”

A Review of Perspectives on Developing Floating Wind Farms

“…It is seen from the table that Portugal has a total installed floating wind power capacity of 27.2 MW, which is contributed by two projects. The first project is WindFloat Atlantic (WFA) [38,39], which has a total power capacity of 3 × 8.4 MW, and the second is WindFloat 1 (WF1) [40], which has a total power capacity of 2 MW. They were both developed by Principle Power and implement wind turbines with a Vestas brand.…”

Blue Seaports: The Smart, Sustainable and Electrified Ports of the Future

“…With that in mind, a possible solution that several authors have proposed is hybridization, i.e., combining multiple concepts in one. Some examples include combining wave and wind energy [128][129][130], wind and solar [131,132], fuel cells, wave and solar [133], as well as combining wave-energy harvesting concepts [134,135]. Within the existing hybrid WECs, the h-WEC stands out as a promising solution for integration into rubble-mound breakwaters [18] that has higher efficiencies for a broader range of wave conditions when compared to standalone solutions [136], which reduces overtopping rates of the structure by about 50% [26].…”