Metocean Requirements for Near-Shore Wave Farms

Date/Time:

13 Mar 2012
14:00-14:20

Location:

South Galleries

Seminar Details
?Metocean Requirements for Near-Shore Wave Farms? An accurate knowledge of the wave climate is fundamental to all areas of wave farm development and operation. In the development stage, an understanding of the long term climate is critical for design, energy production estimates and installation planning. This information is provided through long term hindcast models, calibrated against on-site measurements. Because of the shallow water depths in which near-shore wave energy converters such as Aquamarine Power's Oyster device operate, specialised near-shore wave models must be developed using software such as MIKE21 or SWAN. In the operational phase, high accuracy forecasts are required in order to plan operations and maintenance activities, provide advance warning of extreme wave events, tune the device to optimise performance and provide power generation forecasts to the grid. ?Off-the-shelf? wave forecasting models are generally only suited to deep water. A comparison of wave forecasting data at the EMEC test centre against measured wave data in 13m water depth has shown a large degree of variability in the accuracy of the forecasts together with a large overestimation of wave height. Wave farm developers will therefore be required to transform the wave climate from the deep water forecasts into the near-shore. This will promote a market in fully spectral wave forecast data. These data would be input into a model such as MIKE21, which would be automatically run on a daily basis to provide forecasts appropriate for the near-shore. In order to provide continuity of data, the input forecast data should be sourced from the same model as used to force the hindcast model.