Abstract
Increasing the share of electricity generation from renewable sources is key to ensure a fully decarbonised energy system and fight against climate change. Wave energy is an abundant and powerful resource but at the same time, the least developed of all renewable energy technologies. It is discouraging that despite the considerable efforts the international research community has made over the last decades, wave energy technologies have once and again failed to achieve the desired design convergence to support their future market growth.
Traditional approaches mainly focused on assessing technology maturity have proven insufficient to ensure that wave energy technologies achieve their technical, economic and social goals. To meet the high sector expectations, this research proposes a systematic approach from the outset of technology development that ensures traceability of requirements, creates fair performance assessments and applies sound innovation strategies to overcome the remaining technological challenges.
The common evaluation framework is based on sound Systems Engineering principles. It encompasses the external context, system requirements and evaluation criteria. This step of the methodology creates a prioritisation of the various wave energy attributes for the qualitative assessment of wave energy technologies. The analysis of the external context provides an understanding of the factors influencing the development of wave energy technologies and the corresponding impact on system requirements. The identification of the market application, key drivers and stakeholders’ groups provides an excellent foundation for the objective assessment of wave energy technologies against the systems requirements.
This framework avoids any inconsistency with the formulation of system requirements and can be applied to different levels of technology maturity. It provides flexibility for adapting it to rapidly changing market conditions or stakeholder priorities and can be expanded to focus the analysis on specific wave energy sub-systems. Besides, it grasps the qualitative aspects related to the stakeholder expectations that higher-level metrics such as LCOE cannot provide.
On the other hand, the proposed novel approach guides design decisions along the development process for the adequate management of risk and uncertainty. To this purpose, the holistic assessment developed through this research comprises the evaluation at intermediate development stages and the projection of future costs when the technology has been sufficiently replicated. This step of the methodology facilitates wave energy technology selection and benchmarking at different levels of maturity in a controlled manner.
The fair assessment of wave energy technology performance creates awareness of potential technology gaps throughout the various development stages. It facilitates the selection of the most suitable option for a particular market application and enables benchmarking of technologies across different markets. Additionally, it offers a tool for exploring uncertainties, drawing attention to the cost estimate accuracy and identifying potential learnings from the beginning of technology development.
The innovation strategies proposed in this research deliver valuable information for focusing innovation efforts on areas having the highest influence on technology performance. The methods include the analysis of structural patterns in the wave energy system architecture and the identification of technical trade-offs and corresponding inventive principles. This final step of the methodology results in the identification of promising concepts worth exploring.
Incorporating effective innovation strategies into wave energy development helps to manage system complexity, enhance the understanding of causality within the system, and channel innovation toward useful improvements. It substitutes the conventional trial-and-error method based on expert judgement and engineering compromise. Moreover, it provides a predictable technique to deal with problems based on past knowledge and proven principles, bringing efficiency into the process.
The practical implementation of this methodology to various illustrative cases of hypothetical wave energy systems, public reference models and state-of-the-art technologies has produced promising results. While the findings of this research do not focus on a specific concept that can deliver the necessary step change, the thesis provides a holistic and structured approach to assessing the potential of innovative archetypes. Furthermore, future work could expand and adapt this novel methodology for the assessment of wave energy options to other possible settings.