TITLE:
Feasibility Limits for a Hybrid System with Ocean Wave and Ocean Current Power Plants in Southern Coast of Brazil
AUTHORS:
Andrea Fischer, Jones S. Silva, Alexandre Beluco
KEYWORDS:
Hybrid Energy Systems, Ocean Wave Power Plants, Ocean Current Power Plants, Feasibility Limits, New Technologies, Software Homer
JOURNAL NAME:
Computational Water, Energy, and Environmental Engineering,
Vol.10 No.1,
December
1,
2020
ABSTRACT: Some types of renewable energy have been
experiencing rapid evolution in recent decades, notably among the energies
associated with the oceans, such as wave and current energies. The development
of new energy conversion technologies for these two forms of energy has been
offering a large number of equipment configurations and plant geometries for
energy conversion. This process can be implemented aiming at the result of
feasibility studies in places with energy potentials, establishing minimum
feasibility limits to be reached. This work aims to contribute in this sense
with a feasibility study of a system with ocean wave power plants and with
socio-current power plants to be operated on the southern coast of Brazil. This
study evaluates a hybrid system with contributions from energy supplies
obtained from wave plants and current plants, connected to the grid and
supplying the demand of the municipalities in the North Coast region of the
State of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil. The study was
carried out with simulations with the Homer Legacy software, with some
adaptations for the simulation of ocean wave plants and ocean current plants.
The results indicate that the ocean wave power plants were viable in the vast
majority of simulated scenarios, while the ocean current power plants were
viable in the scenarios with more intense average ocean current speeds and with
more expensive energy acquired from the interconnected system.