Maximizing Performance and Availability of an OWC Wave Power Plant, while Simultaneously Reducing Cost and Mitigating Risk

摘要

Already very early in their life cycle innovative technologies are benchmarked against established solutions. For Ocean Energies costs of electricity production a possible customer incurs over the life time of a plant are the most important measure for benchmarking. For such a new technology to be attractive the financial investment calculation has to show a positive result. Mathematically, this means that the present value (PV) of the returns from energy sales at minimum offsets the PV of all cash out-flows associated with a potential Ocean Energies project. Such a calculation comprises all the initial capital expenditures for the plant, all operation and maintenance costs, the final decommissioning costs and of course the technological risk which is represented in the investors' discount rate. This paper introduces a driver analysis for energy production costs based on Wavegen's OWC technology driving a Wells-Turbine. It is shown how this analysis can be used as a powerful guideline to prioritize R&D efforts in order to maximize customer value creation. Wavegen's development process of the past years is a direct consequence of these insights and aims to pull the longest levers first: Hence, at first priority the mechanical design has been improved such that maximum use could be made of existing design know how and available manufacturing resources of related technologies. In parallel the electrical output has been maximized by optimizing sub system efficiencies of the plant with simulation tools like Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Finite Element Method (FEM) and Dynamic System Simulation. Finally, only manufacturing and intense testing of prototype units combined with the operating experience obtained, could give a feedback of the success of the measures designed above. Especially availability and reliability of the plant can only be evaluated under real life conditions for a period of time which is long enough to obtain statistically valid quantifications of the taken actions.