Over the last decades, several efforts have been made to develop an alternative and sustainable energy source from wind waves. To achieve the financial sustainability of this technology, most of the research has focused on analyzing facilities composed by several wave energy converters (WECs) arrays instead of isolated ones. Although the interaction between devices and its implications on the performance of the facilities have been studied beforehand, these previous works only considered certain combinations of sea states, limiting the applicability of the results. This work applies a new methodology based on statistical methods to assess the performance of different WEC array distributions during their entire life-cycle in an efficient way, using downscaling techniques and advanced numerical modeling for the propagation of the wave climate. The results obtained during the hindcasted life-cycle are used to analyze the maintenance and operation capabilities of the different alternatives of arrays defined for the WEC facility. The interactions between devices and their efficiency considering the associated impact are also quantified. The whole process was applied to a hypothetical array location in the Gulf of Cádiz (southwestern Spain), where three different array distributions were defined. Results show that the distance between WECs is a key parameter that controls the potential energy production, the efficiency * Corresponding author alopez50@us.es Preprint submitted to Applied Energy June 7, 2017 VERSIÓN PREPRINT -Primera versiónof the facility and the interaction between several devices.