Hybridisation potential assessment of marine energy technologies with offshore wind

Details

Supervisors

De Jaeger, Emmanuel

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil électromécanicien, à finalité spécialisée: énergie

Abstract

The EU strategy on offshore renewable energy aims to significantly expand the use of offshore wind and marine energy technologies within Europe's electricity production. This expansion poses significant challenges due to the inherent intermittency of these energy sources, especially wind. Hybridisation, which combines complementary energy sources, stands out as a promising strategy to address this issue. This study focuses on the hybridisation of marine energy technologies and storage with offshore wind, specifically selecting tidal, wave and marine floating photovoltaic energy. A techno-economic analysis is conducted in different European offshore locations to evaluate the performance of these offshore hybrid systems. First, the Pearson correlation coefficient analysis reveals no significant complementarity between marine energy sources and wind with confidence. Then, to address the variability of the energy output, a sizing optimisation approach is employed which aims to minimise the standard deviation over the year. It shows an reduction up to 45% compared with wind and outlines the ability of wave energy to combine with wind. It appears that tidal alone is quite limited to improve the variability, it has a constant bell-shaped profile that adds fluctuations on the signal, a phenomenon that is not captured by the standard deviation. Although marine floating photovoltaic shows a good complementarity with wind, its proportion in the mix is low. Subsequently, the storage integration analysis reveals that the grid connection size has a significantly higher impact on reducing the curtailment losses than the adoption of storage. Moreover, the hybrid system demonstrates the capacity to reduce the grid connection size. Finally, an economic analysis shows that the expected reduction in costs of marine energy technologies will decrease the difference with offshore wind in the future and can make this solution cost-effective.