Increasing the energy production of a MRE farm considering thermal and techno-economic aspects

Electrical power generated from sustainable energies, such as marine renewable energy (MRE), is a key to the future. However, the cost of production still remains higher than for conventional energy sources. This paper describes a preliminary techno-economic study about the energy production management of a modelled point absorber-based wave energy converters (WEC) farm that could be installed in the vicinity of the SEM-REV site, i.e. the French multi-technology open sea testing site. The approach presented in this paper relies on a wave to wire model of the farm coupled with an electro-thermal analysis of the SEM-REV export cable, and a simple WEC economic cost model. The proposed methodology, developed under Matlab-Simulink ® , can be extended to other WEC types and more sophisticated models and control strategies. That makes it an interesting tool to determine the optimum number of WECs which can be added in an existing farm, as it depends highly on the sea climate of the future site, and in particular on its temporal characteristics. It is demonstrated in this paper that it could be feasible, from a techno-economic perspective, to increase the rated power of an existing WEC farm without requiring expensive grid reinforcements. This could be achieved by better exploiting the electro-thermal flexibility of its existing electric infrastructure.