Recent resource assessment studies indicate that the technically recoverable US wave energy resource is 1400 TW-hr/year, which equals approximately 35% of 2011 US electricity generation. This finding has renewed commercial and governmental interest in WEC technologies and indicates that wave energy could play a significant role in the US renewable energy portfolio in the years to come. Nevertheless, despite decades of research and development, wave energy converters (WECs) are not yet a commercially viable renewable energy generation technology.
In this talk I will first review the current generation of WEC technologies and will describe the challenges that need to be overcome for WECs to achieve commercial viability. Next, I will describe NREL’s ongoing efforts to develop numerical modeling tools to assist in the wave energy converter design process. Specifically, I will discuss our efforts to develop a reduced-order design optimization tool that models WEC devices by coupling time-domain multi-body dynamics simulations with potential flow hydrodynamics models. Finally, I will discuss NREL’s plans to use smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation methods to enable high fidelity predictions of wave slamming and overtopping loads from large waves during ocean storms.