Wave energy trends over the Bay of Biscay and the consequences for wave energy converters

Alain Ulazia, Markel Penalba, Gabriel Ibarra-Berastegui, John Ringwood and Jon Saénz

Energy, 2017, vol. 141, issue C, 624-634

Abstract: This is one of the pioneer and preliminary attempt to study the influence of wave energy trends on the absorbed power of wave energy converters. For that purpose, the reanalysis of the past century ERA20 has been calibrated via quantile-matching against the reanalysis ERA-Interim in their intersection period (1979–2010). The validation against four buoys in the Bay of Biscay is presented in this paper, showing a better agreement of ERA-Interim-WAM model when compared to the original ERA20. In addition, calibrated ERA20 shows a significant error reduction compared to the original ERA20. Hence, calibrated ERA20 presents an increment of the wave energy resource, more than 1 kW/m per decade, in the area of study and a general increment of the wave height and wave period throughout the analyzed decades. Finally, using the calibrated series at a given gridpoint in the bay, power absorption of a generic wave energy converter (WEC) is examined, combining the power matrix of the WEC and the two-variable (wave height and period) probability density functions (PDF) of the five do-decades of the past century. Results show important variations of the PDF, which results in significant differences, up to a 15% increase between two do-decades, in the annual mean power production.

Keywords: Wave energy trends; ERA-Interim; ERA-20C; Wave energy converters; Fluid mechanics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544217316183
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:141:y:2017:i:c:p:624-634

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2017.09.099

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().