Abstract
Yakutat is a small Alaskan community with approximately 600 residents at the Northeastern end of the Gulf of Alaska. Currently, it is being powered by diesel generators with no form of battery storage or renewable energy usage. In 2016, a study by the Alaska Center for Energy and Power assessed the wave energy resource in the area, and it was found that the wave environment is especially energetic during the winter months. Updated wave energy resource estimates were calculated from Simulating WAves Nearshore (SWAN) simulations. Several wave energy converters (WECs) are considered in harnessing the wave energy in order to reduce the amount of diesel used. High-fidelity solar photovoltaic data was measured in town in order to characterize the solar energy resource. In order to find the system with the most diesel offset, the Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER) program was used to economically optimize between wave and solar energy, and battery storage. It was found that a unique combination of differing WECs, solar, and batteries offset the most diesel. This may mean that multiple architectures of WECs may be needed in order to extract the most amount of wave energy.