The “Powering the Blue Economy” initiative of the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technology Office has identified persistent ocean observations and autonomous underwater vehicle recharge as the most promising commercial markets for smaller-scale marine energy systems.
Such systems can exploit high-density, sub-surface renewable energy resources to provide cost-effective power for environmental monitoring of offshore wind and offshore oil and gas activities (Cross-Functional Team 5).
Team Leads
The marine energy application team leads are:
- Elise DeGeorge (National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
- Jeremy Kasper (University of Alaska – Fairbanks)
- HY Kang (Texas A&M University)
- Brian Polagye (University of Washington)
Focus Areas
The team’s focus areas are:
- Small-scale marine energy systems: We envision efforts in this area encompassing “co-design” with environmental monitoring and vehicle recharge, as well as stand-alone “plug-and-play” systems. Marine energy system reliability will benefit from advances in health monitoring and contributing data streams in other applications (Cross-Functional Team). 2). We will work with certification bodies to ensure that marine energy systems can meet regulatory requirements for monitoring and do not impede the primary monitoring or exploration missions in support of offshore wind and oil and gas.
- Large-scale marine energy systems: Fundamental investigations of utility-scale marine energy applications that employ transformative design frameworks, advanced data digitization, fluid-structure interaction modeling and operation methodologies for ensuring safe and optimal field operations (Cross-Functional Teams 1, 2, and 4) will be carried out to confirm the commercial potential of utility-scale marine energy. We will hasten the development of repetitive designs for large-scale and small-scale marine energy systems by using existing oil and gas or offshore wind platforms as testbeds.
- Safety-conscious value engineering: This area will focus on translating lessons learned in offshore wind, as well as in oil and gas, to marine energy generation systems’ unique requirements at a range of scales. This includes technology adoption and operational development and co-generation of power by multiple systems (Cross-Functional Team 2).
