Optimized wind and wave energy resource assessment and offshore exploitability in the Mediterranean Sea

Francesco Ferrari, Giovanni Besio, Federico Cassola and Andrea Mazzino

Energy, 2020, vol. 190, issue C

Abstract: A mapping of wind and wave potentials of the whole Mediterranean basin, aimed at identifying the areas where wind and wave events are not time-correlated, was performed in order to plan offshore coupled wind-wave energy extraction. For this purpose, meteorological and marine conditions of the whole Mediterranean basin for the period 1979–2016 were obtained by means of WRF and WaveWatchIII simulations. More promising areas where to plan a hybrid installation for the joint exploitation of wind and wave energy resources were thus selected on the basis of a suitable statistical index. Such an index, combines information on the availability of wind and waves together with the degree of correlation of the occurrence of the two resources. The index will efficiently select the most interesting area in the Mediterranean Sea characterized by non-concomitant-in-time availability of wind and wave thus ensuring an optimized time-availability of the combined resources. Finally the power production of an hypothetical hybrid plant composed by different models of wind rotors and wave energy converters is evaluated for four test sites. The results of this analysis shows that the described index represents a useful tool for preliminary evaluation of areas where combined wind-wave energy extraction could be more profitable.

Keywords: WRF; WaveWatch III; Wind and wave hindcast; Mediterranean sea; Offshore energy combined exploitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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/S0360544219321425
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:190:y:2020:i:c:s0360544219321425

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.116447

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 ().