18b Dashboard for Marine Energy Site Assessment and Monitoring

The marine environment is a vast energy resource with the potential for supporting the world’s growing energy demand. Increasing the number of marine renewable energy projects would expand a renewable energy portfolio that supports economic prosperity and energy security. However, marine energy technologies—specifically wave energy converters—face challenges from the high costs of planning, permitting, and site monitoring required for project development. The disparate nature of existing site assessment and monitoring services means developers must piece together and contextualize fragmented information for marine energy deployments. The lack of robust and coherent site information leads to unsustainably-high deployment costs and perception of high project risk for investors, regulators, and stakeholders. The feasibility and success of marine energy projects depend on low-cost, agile tools for site characterization and environmental monitoring that meet international industry standards. The proposed wave energy resource assessment dashboard will substantially improve siting, permitting, operations, and maintenance of marine energy projects by providing an integrated site assessment solution that is a one-stop-shop for a developer’s site characterization and monitoring needs. The integrated dashboard will be developed utilizing state-of-the-art data-assimilative modeling tools that can be coupled with low-cost, rapidly-deployable wave buoys and environmental sensing hardware. The combined software and hardware solution will reduce wave energy site characterization and wave climate monitoring costs by over 60% and provide assessments that meet international industry standards. The proof-of-concept dashboard developed with Phase I funding allows for screening-level wave energy resource assessments and demonstrated the ability to integrate real-time site data from monitoring systems. Phase I research also provided insights on best practices for further development of the integrated dashboard into a commercially viable software product that will be a cost saving tool to provide critical site information for marine energy projects. In Phase II research will advance the development and commercialization of the integrated dashboard based on the research conducted during Phase I. The product will be expanded to include data-assimilative modeling for marine energy site assessment and environmental monitoring. Development efforts will be focused on the assimilation of meteorological and oceanographic modeling products and low-cost, rapidly- deployable monitoring solutions. The final integrated dashboard product will provide a low-cost solution that provides comprehensive, scalable industry standard energy resource assessments and offshore characterizations required for successful marine energy development.