Abstract
The degree of reduction of required electrical energy storage for smoothing the power output in a wave farm is investigated by considering spatial power smoothing by a particular choice of aggregation of wave energy converters (WEC). Several possible arrays are analyzed considering that no energy storage is provided locally at each WEC unit and that all energy storage required will be electrical and provided at the point of connection to the electrical network. This paper focuses on a case study of direct drive WEC for near shore devices and the power output data implemented in the study derives from a linear hydrodynamic model developed in Matlab with input forces obtained by solving the radiation problem with the finite element simulation tool Comsol. The results from simulations indicate that there is a significant smoothing effect for sinusoidal waves and quite a good short term smoothing effect is achieved in an irregular sea.