Cost of Energy Assessment
for Wave, Tidal and OTEC
| Project Duration October 2014 – March 2015 |
Project Coordinator Henry Jeffrey, The University of Edinburgh, UK |
| Project Partners Alex Raventos, WavEC Offshore Renewables, Portugal Julia Chozas, Julia F. Chozas, Consulting Engineer, Denmark Mirko Previsic, Re Vision Consulting, USA |
Project Advisors Kim Nielsen, RAMBOLL Group A/S, Denmark David Aderibigbe, FOT-K Consortium, Nigeria |
| Further information www.ocean-energy-systems.org |
OBJECTIVE
The goal of this project is, within a 12 month project timeframe, to engage a large number of international stakeholders to deliver a reliable and credible LCOE assessment for wave, tidal, and OTEC technologies, together with the identification of the routes to maximise rapid cost reduction through international collaboration and deployment effort.
The assessment of LCOE for ocean energy devices represents a critical element of understanding in the development of ocean energy array projects. While the cost of existing prototype devices is high, there is scope for significant reductions of the cost of energy. In order to unlock some of these cost savings, the deployment levels of ocean energy converters will need to ramp up and projects must progress into the construction and operation phases.
This project aims to provide an authoritative view on which cost reductions are feasible at a global level, taking into account the experience from other technologies. By undertaking a bottom-up assessment of the cost components of leading wave, tidal, and OTEC systems, this work will investigate the development and fabrication of leading devices or systems, and their integration into commercial arrays and large scale power plants. The assessment will include project development costs (including streamlining of environmental consenting) and operations and maintenance. The work will be informed by a series of in-depth interviews with technology developers, and will build upon work carried out in European funded projects, such as SI Ocean, DTOcean, Equimar or Waveplam.
ACHIEVEMENTS
The web-based GIS tool was launched on the OES website in the first quarter of 2014 and a document has been prepared presenting the background/sources of the data utilized on the OES web-based GIS. The user of the application is able to display any combination of the provided information with the help of a pointand-click interface which runs in any common web browser without the need of installing separate software. Through the interface, the viewer can zoom and move through the map, select items and display related information and download or print images of the displayed information as desired.
