INTEGRAL CONSULTING INC. — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 18b

Description

The marine environment is a vast energy resource that has great potential for meeting the world’s growing energy demand. Increasing the abundance of marine renewable energy projects would expand a renewable energy portfolio that supports economic prosperity and energy security. However, marine energy technologies, specifically wave energy converters, are still in early development phases and face the challenges from high permitting costs and lack of site baseline or monitoring precedence. All of this leads to high risk perception and high levelized cost of energy. The feasibility and success of marine energy projects for contributing to the energy infrastructure and Powering the Blue Economy applications depend on low-cost, agile tools for site characterization and environmental monitoring. The marine energy industry needs present an opportunity for the development of a robust and efficient tool for wave energy resource characterization that can also meet baseline and future site monitoring requirements. We propose to develop a low-cost, user-friendly, rapidly deployable hardware and software network for wave energy site characterization, wave climate impact monitoring, and environmental monitoring. The product will be developed utilizing existing, low-cost, commercially available wave buoys and environmental sensing hardware, which will reduce wave energy site characterization and wave climate monitoring hardware costs by up to 80%. Combining the existing monitoring hardware with state-of-the- art data assimilative site modeling and monitoring dashboard, wave energy converter site planning, permitting, and monitoring costs can be reduced by at least 50%. Phase I efforts will (1) demonstrate proof of concept for a user-friendly, wave energy resource assessment dashboard supported by low-cost hardware, and (2) design a wave energy resource assessment online toolkit for a non-expert audience that will display easily interpretable wave climate maps, including wave energy, and environmental monitoring data, adapted to best meet the needs of wave energy developers and stakeholders. While geared toward wave energy applications, marine energy projects will benefit from accurate site characterization and environmental monitoring. The proposed technology will aid the marine energy siting process in becoming more efficient and reliable. The rapidly deployable aspect of the hardware network will allow for immediate site assessment in remote areas where Powering the Blue Economy applications will be utilized. Overall, the online toolkit and associated hardware resulting from this project will directly contribute to lowering the cost of the wave energy projects by effectively assessing the wave resources and providing reliable site environmental baselines and operational monitoring in a wide range of conditions.