An £8 million project designed to unlock the potential of the UK’s wave and tidal stream energy has been launched by a consortium of commercial and academic organisations.
The Performance Assessment of Wave and Tidal Array Systems (PerAWaT) project, which is being led by Garrad Hassan, will develop a series of models to predict the performance of wave and tidal stream generator arrays.
The project will provide more information for potential investors in the nascent technology, according to the UK’s Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), which launched the project in October.
“Although the UK has huge marine potential, investment is being held back by uncertainty about the overall costs involved and the potential returns on investment in wave and tidal technologies,” said ETI CEO Dr. David Clarke.
“This project will deliver greatly improved modelling tools to provide more accurate forecasting of energy yields and reduce the uncertainty and investment risk faced by project developers when planning large scale wave and tidal energy schemes.”
The project is also backed by EDF Energy, E.On, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Oxford, Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Manchester. It will build on existing knowledge to accelerate the development of sophisticated tools that will become essential as the marine energy industry matures, says Clarke.
Garrad Hassan Marine Renewables Group Leader Dr. Robert Rawlinson-Smith said: “Deployment of large scale arrays of marine energy conversion devices will only occur when project developers have sufficient confidence in the return on their investment.
“The ETI core objective of accelerating the commercial deployment of energy technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be addressed by this project as it will both establish and validate numerical models capable of predicting the performance of wave and tidal energy converters (WECs and TECs) when operating in arrays.”
There is currently no software package or validated method of estimating the average annual energy production of a wave or tidal stream energy farm.
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