Exceedence and Wood PLC have recently completed a Case study on the Seapower Wave Energy device using their combined Optiwave software.
On a first pass we were able to immediately improve performance and reduce cost by 7%. Further, using the software, we were able to understand the cost drivers and then show a target of £0.15 was achievable as per WES targets.
Seapower said “The levelised cost of our technology is ultimately a measure of how competitive the technology can be, and will determine its commercial uptake in the renewable energy sector. We needed to prove to our funders and to the public, that we could engineer the costs of the Seapower Platform(tm) down in a systematic way, and that this process has been key to our design decisions. We have spent significant time and resources learning how to do this ourselves and with our Scottish partners, as OptiWave wasn’t available at that time. Since then, we have recently had the opportunity to take part in a case study with OptiWave and the teams at Wood and Exceedence.
We are very satisfied with the engineering and financial assessment performed using OptiWave, and in particular the demonstration of a realistic path to low and competitive LCOE levels. The advances in power production capabilities demonstrated by the software should also assist us in the search for further investment required to take our technology to TRL levels 8 & 9, and demonstrates that the technology has further potential to lower LCOE even further. The integrated nature of the engineering and financial models, in addition to the online database of wave resource information, are major plus points for us. We believe LCOE is the best metric to determine the competitiveness of all technologies in this sector”
Read more about Seapower
Click for more on Optiwave Software
Jointly developed by Wood and Exceedence, the OptiWave platform combines two software tools, Exceedence Finance, a techno-financial modelling package which performs detailed financial appraisals, and Flexcom Wave, an offshore marine energy engineering simulator which provides enhanced insight into power generation capabilities and structural designs.
Full Case study is here
Optiwave-Sea-Power-Case-Study.pdf
