Abstract
The objective of this report, as part of the NEEDS project, is to provide data on costs and the life cycle inventories for offshore wave and tidal energy technologies. The focus is the present and long term technological development of the wave and tidal energy technology.
The first part of the report deals with the State-of-the-Art of the technologies. The aim is to be able to define a reference technology to be used in the remaining part of the report. Caused by the infantry of the industry where only at the end of 2008 the first pre-commercial devices were deployed not much detailed information has been available.
The second part deals with the future technological developments. In this section the technological and non-technological barriers and drivers are discussed. On the basis of the barriers and drivers three scenarios are described, based on a conservative (pessimistic development), moderate (optimistic-realistic development) and optimistic (very optimist development) scenario for the future wave and tidal energy technology. The road maps describe in detail how the technologies of wave and tidal energy could develop and how costs could develop in respect to projections of installed capacity and experience curves.
In the optimistic scenario it is concluded that the development of wave and tidal energy after 2025 can be described as a “self-runner”, i.e. that the wave and tidal technologies can compete with traditional oil and gas technologies if taking the most basic externalities into consideration.
In the moderate scenario it is projected that wave and tidal energy devices have an investment cost of 1,200 €/kW and a production price of 0.04 €/kWh by 2050 and in the optimistic scenario it is projected that wave and tidal energy devices have an investment cost of 1,000 €/kW and a production price of 0.03 €/kWh by 2050.
The installed power is by 2050 in the moderate scenario projected to be 194GW and in the optimistic scenario to be 309GW.
The third part of the report deals with the life cycle inventories for the present and future wave and tidal energy technologies. One of the technologies Wave Dragon has been selected as reference technology and the data are described and analysed in the last section of the report.