Publications

Castro-Santos, L., Silva, D., Bento, A.R., Salvação, N. and Guedes Soares, C. (2018), “Economic feasibility of wave energy farms in Portugal”, Energies, Vol. 11, pp. 31-49

This paper develops a methodology to determine the economic feasibility of implementing offshore wave energy farms in the Portuguese continental coast. This methodology follows several phases: the geographic phase, the energy phase, the economic phase and the restrictions phase. First, in the geographic phase, the height and the period of the waves, the bathymetry, the distance from the farm to the shore, from farm to shipyard and from farm to port are calculated. In the energy phase the energy produced by each wave energy converter is determined and in the economic phase, the parameters calculated in the previous phases are used as input to find the economic parameters. Finally, in the restrictions phase, a limitation by the bathymetry will be added to the economic maps, whose value will be different depending on the floating offshore WEC. In this study three wave energy converters have been considered, Pelamis, AquaBuoy and Wave Dragon, and several scenarios for electric tariff have been taken into account. The results obtained indicate what is the best WEC for this study in terms of its LCOE, IRR and NPV, and where is the best area to install wave energy farms.

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