History

The WCWI team includes academics, government and private sector engineers who have a proven track record of productive collaboration in wave energy resource assessment, dynamics simulation of offshore systems and integration of renewable energy technologies. Through that past work, a suite of unique tools have been created that will be used to achieve the project outputs.

Wave Energy Resource Assessment

Several WCWI team members were active within the West Coast Wave Collaboration Program (WCWCP) which was executed between 2009-2011. The WCWCP resulted in the development of two new Canadian tools for wave energy resource assessment. The first was a medium scale coastal wave propagation model for the West Coast of Vancouver Island (WCVI).  The second WCWCP development was a new directional wave monitoring buoy, a WatchMate ODAS buoy, that was developed specifically for the highly energetic conditions of Amphitrite Bank, 7 km SW of Ucluelet, within the WCVI model grid.

Full Scale WEC Performance Assessment

For non-linear time domain simulation of point absorber WEC concepts, a commercial package, developed over the last 12 years by Dr. Buckham and Dynamic Systems Analysis (DSA), referred to as ProteusDS will be applied. ProteusDS includes a marine cable dynamics model that has been used in the study of towed and remotely operated vehicles, deep water risers and variable length towed systems.

WEC Integration Strategies

The project team is well versed in the model based design and development of integration strategies for renewable energy convertors in both off gird and grid connected scenarios. At IESVic, mixed integer optimization has been applied, at coarse time scales, to consider the optimal usage of tidal and wave energy converters in Haida Gwaii micro grid. Operational and sizing parameters of renewable energy storage systems have been examined using a spectral analysis framework for wind integration in the same Haida Gwaii grid. The load balancing strategy used in that work could be adapted to the Hot Springs Cove analysis by including the detailed description of the variable community load and the correlations between that load and the WEC availability.