Advanced second-generation design tools to accelerate the commercialisation of ocean energy

Technologies for obtaining energy from the sea are not mature enough for extensive use. Ocean energies face efficiency, reliability and survival challenges that lead to high costs compared to other energy sources. An open source platform of design tools will allow to overcome these challenges, supporting total market growth and technological innovation.

These second-generation design tools will be developed and demonstrated for the selection, development, deployment, and evaluation of ocean energy systems (including subsystems, energy capture devices and parks), aligning innovation and development processes with those used in mature engineering sectors.

These comprehensive applications will be demonstrated in configurations of projects with real technological deployment, to which access shall be provided by industrial and commercial agents. This set of digital models will also give a common language to the whole sector of ocean energies.

The generated designs will balance the technological and financial risks that, together with a great improvement in cost and efficiency, will ensure that ocean energy technologies are commercially attractive. The expected impact for the next 5 years will contribute to reaching a significant increase in the amount of ocean energy technologies arriving to the market successfully, an improvement in the uncertainty of their efficiency that will contribute to reaching up to 6% and 8% (respectively) in cost (in the Levelised Cost of Energy -LCoE) of wave and tidal energies, and a significant reduction in operation, maintenance and installation costs.

These developments and demonstrations shall take place within the framework of the European DTOcean+ project, that has recently started .

DTOcean+, coordinated by TECNALIA, brings together representatives of all key user and stakeholder groups and developers of Europe’s leading ocean energy sub-systems, devices and arrays. 

This project has been funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 785921.

 

 

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