Evaluation of Various Technologies for Wave Energy Conversion in the Portuguese Nearshore

Abstract

Abstract:The objective of the present work is to perform an evaluation of the performance provided by various technologies for wave energy conversion in the Portuguese continental coastal environment. The wave climate in the target area is first analyzed using the results from three years of simulations with a wave prediction system based on numerical models. Based on the above data, diagrams for the bivariate distributions of the sea states occurrences, defined by the significant wave height and the energy period, are designed for both winters and whole years. On this basis, the output of five different technologies for the conversion of wave energy is assessed in some relevant locations from the Portuguese nearshore. According to the results obtained, the Portuguese continental coastal environment appears to be appropriate for the wave energy extraction. At the same time, the present work shows that the output of the wave energy conversion devices does not depend only on the average wave energy but is also dependent on the distribution of the wave energy among the sea states of different periods. For this reason, a good agreement between the characteristics of the power matrices of the wave energy converters operating in a certain place and the diagrams for the bivariate distributions of the sea states occurrences corresponding to the considered location represents a key issue in selecting the most appropriate technology for wave energy conversion.

Sustainability of the Renewable Energy Extraction Close to the Mediterranean Islands

“…[36]. During the years, different studies focused their attention to the Point Absorber, which is able to intercept the wave energy from all directions [37]. The optimization of the resulting power performance of this particular type of Wave Energy Converter (WEC) represents the next step in order to improve the economic sustainability of the project [38].…”

Wave Energy Resource Assessment off the Coast of China around the Zhoushan Islands

“…P ij is the power output of the device, which originates from the power matrix for the specific WEC. The power matrices of the WECs that were selected in this paper were collected from the open literature [32,44,45]. f ij is the occurrence frequency for various sea states, which was collected from scatter diagrams [37].…”

Estimation of Downtime and of Missed Energy Associated with a Wave Energy Converter by the Equivalent Power Storm Model

“…The efforts of several research groups were oriented toward the determination of the most attractive sites and of the most reliable technologies for wave energy exploitation. The former analyses were conducted in several areas, such as the Mediterranean Sea [3][4][5][6][7][8][9], the Black Sea [10,11], the USA [12][13][14] and in various Asian regions [15][16][17]. The latter analyses involved the conception of a variety of devices and theoretical and experimental tests on both small-scale and full-scale devices [18][19][20].…”