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Recent Advancements in Offshore Renewable Energy

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Energy Sustainability".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 April 2024) | Viewed by 4566

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
1. Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research (CIIMAR), University of Porto, Avenida General Norton de Matos, s/n, 4200-465 Matosinhos, Portugal
2. Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto (FEUP), Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal
Interests: offshore renewable energy; wave energy; tidal stream energy; coastal modeling
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Guest Editor
Mechanical Science, Division of System Science, Nagasaki University, 1-4 Bunkyo-machi, 852-8521 Nagasaki, Japan
Interests: tidal stream energy; coastal modeling; tidal current turbulence

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Offshore renewable energy (ORE) sources (e.g., offshore wind, ocean thermal, salinity gradient, tidal, and wave energy) are expected to play an important role in the transition toward a sustainable and carbon neutral energy model. A good example of this is the offshore wind energy industry, which, over the last decade, has developed rapidly and is currently on the verge of reaching the commercialization stage. However, the commercial development of other ORE sources (e.g., wave and tidal stream energy) has proven elusive. In consequence, extensive research is still required to increase the performance levels, reliability, and cost-competitiveness of most ORE conversion technologies. Similarly, further research is needed to address in detail the potential effects on the marine environment derived from the operation of ORE technologies.

Against this backdrop, this Special Issue aims to showcase the latest research achievements and findings in the ORE field. Therefore, researchers are invited to contribute with original and review articles, dealing with topics such as:

  • Advances in ORE resource characterization and forecasting;
  • Developments in ORE conversion technologies;
  • Hybridization of ORE conversion technologies and combination with other renewable sources (solar PV, green hydrogen, etc.);
  • Control and modeling of ORE systems;
  • Grid integration of ORE systems;
  • Life-cycle cost modeling of ORE systems;
  • Environmental and socio-economic impact assessment of ORE systems;
  • Artificial intelligence applications for ORE systems;
  • Assessment of legal frameworks applicable to ORE deployments.

Dr. Jose Victor Ramos
Dr. Patxi Garcia Novo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • offshore wind energy
  • wave energy
  • tidal energy
  • resource characterization and forecasting
  • ORE conversion technologies
  • control strategies for ORE systems
  • grid integration of ORE systems
  • techno-economic assessment of ORE systems

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

39 pages, 1796 KiB  
Article
Estimating the Cost of Wave Energy Converters at an Early Design Stage: A Bottom-Up Approach
by Enrico Giglio, Ermando Petracca, Bruno Paduano, Claudio Moscoloni, Giuseppe Giorgi and Sergej Antonello Sirigu
Sustainability 2023, 15(8), 6756; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15086756 - 17 Apr 2023
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3989
Abstract
The role of ocean energy is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years, and techno-economic analysis will play a crucial role. Nowadays, despite strong assumptions, the vast majority of studies model costs using a top-down approach (the TdA) that leads to an [...] Read more.
The role of ocean energy is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years, and techno-economic analysis will play a crucial role. Nowadays, despite strong assumptions, the vast majority of studies model costs using a top-down approach (the TdA) that leads to an unrepresentative economic model. WEC developers usually go through the the TdA approach because more detailed cost data are not available at an earlier design stage. At a very advanced design stage, some studies have also proposed techno-economic optimisation based on the bottom-up approach (BuA). This entails that the detailed cost metrics presented in the literature are very specific to the WEC type (hence not applicable to other cases) or unrepresentative. This lack of easily accessible detailed cost functions in the current state of the art leads to ineffective optimisations at an earlier stage of WEC development. In this paper, a BuA for WECs is proposed that can be used for techno-economic optimisation at the early design stage. To achieve this goal, cost functions of most common components in the WEC field are retrieved from the literature, exposed, and critically compared. The large number of components considered allows the results of this work to be applied to a vast pool of WECs. The novelty of the presented cost functions is their parameterization with respect to the technological specifications, which already enables their adoption in the design optimisation phase. With the goal of quantifying the results and critically discuss the differences between the TdA and the BuA, the developed methodology and cost functions are applied to a case study and specifically adopted for the calculation of the capital cost of PeWEC (pendulum wave energy converter). In addition, a hybrid approach (HyA) is presented and discussed as an intermediate approach between the TdA and the BdA. Results are compared in terms of capital expenditure (CapEx) and pie cost distribution: the impact of adopting different cost metrics is discussed, highlighting the role that reliable cost functions can have on early stage technology development. This paper proposes more than 50 cost functions for WEC components. Referring to the case study, it is shown that while the total cost differs only slightly (11%), the pie distribution changes by up to 22%. Mooring system and power take-off are the cost items where the TdA and the HyA differ more from the BuA cost estimate. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Advancements in Offshore Renewable Energy)
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