The Integration of Tools for the Techno-Economic Evaluation of Fixed and Floating Tidal Energy Deployment in the Irish Sea

Marine renewable energy (MRE) development will be crucial to achieve worldwide energy decarbonization. In Europe, 1 GW and 40 GW of ocean energy are set to be developed by 2030 and 2050, respectively. Support is essential if wave and tidal stream arrays are to become more economically viable than they currently are. Four recently developed open-access software tools are used in this study to investigate the critical and expensive elements of potential demonstration and commercial scale tidal projects. The tools have been designed and built to assist users with array configurations, foundation and mooring (F&M) design, operation and maintenance (O&M) strategies, and techno-economic analysis. Demonstration of their use is performed in this study to model scenarios for 2 MW, 10 MW, 40 MW, and 100 MW tidal energy projects employing typical 500 kW fixed and 2 MW floating turbines at the West Anglesey Tidal Demonstration Zone in the Irish Sea. The following metrics are examined: the power output and wake losses of staggered and line configurations; the design and costs of simple gravity-based foundations, gravity-based anchors and the four-chain catenary mooring system of a single turbine; the mean O&M costs and farm availability over the project life; and the breakdown of levelized cost of energy (LCoE) for all eight scenarios to ultimately reveal minimum values of 173 EUR/MWh and 147 EUR/MWh for fixed and floating tidal energy technologies, respectively. The thorough analysis facilitated within these four tools to forecast realistic situations in a specific location can help users design a tidal energy project for an area with considerable potential for commercial scale projects, and thus assist the ocean energy community in promoting and nurturing the sector in the years and decades ahead.