The Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult and Frazer-Nash Consultancy Ltd will be demonstrating a state-of-the-art approach to assessing and reducing tidal energy project risks at the International Tidal Energy Summit (ITES) in London in November 2015.
ORE Catapult and Frazer-Nash will be illustrating their approach, which can deliver substantial industry benefits, in a live demonstration to be held at the pre-conference risk and reliability workshop on 23 November.
Neil Adams, Group Lead at Frazer-Nash, and Ralph Torr, Renewable Technology Engineer at ORE Catapult, will be detailing how this approach can help developers increase their understanding of the uncertainties – and thus the risks – associated with energy yield assessment for wave and tidal energy projects. Understanding these risks can help project developers, technology developers and researchers to prioritise their activities to reduce uncertainties. It can also help project financiers to understand the importance and potential scale of uncertainties, informing discussion on economic risk.
The workshop will present the state of the art in uncertainty assessment and demonstrate an open source tool that has been developed by ORE Catapult and Frazer-Nash, in collaboration with industry and academia. The tool, with associated guidance documents, helps to identify key uncertainties in wave and tidal energy yield simply and systematically. They provide a common language and standardised approach to assessing and reducing uncertainty, and allow projects to be compared on a like-for-like basis.
Neil Adams said:
“We are delighted to be working with ORE Catapult to bring this approach to the International Tidal Energy Summit. Tidal energy has a significant role to play in supplying future global energy needs, and we believe that this workshop will help developers, researchers and financiers to overcome some of the stumbling blocks that can stop them moving forward with projects.”
Ralph Torr said:
“This project is another great example of the collaborative approach ORE Catapult is taking to help understand and lower risks associated with the first commercial tidal energy arrays. Such collaborative activities are vital to ensuring the tidal industry as a whole maximises the value of both research and commercial activities to date, and over the coming years.”
The 9th International Tidal Energy Summit will take place from 23-25 November 2015 at the Hilton Tower Bridge in London. The event attracts over 400 delegates and a number of expert speakers from industry, government, and finance organisations.
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Notes for editors
Measuring energy yields in the wind and marine energy industries
In the wind industry, processes for measuring energy yields are fairly mature, and investors use these estimates to assess the risks associated with investing in wind farm projects. By minimising these risks, project developers can attract investors, improving their own return on investment.
In the marine energy industry, this process is far less mature. There are no commercial-scale marine energy projects in operation, so there is no operational experience on which to base these estimates. Numerical models also lack full-scale validation for the same reason. As a result, the uncertainties assigned can be very large, potentially making marine energy projects appear unattractive to investors.
The three guidance documents and the uncertainty management tool can be found on our website at ORE Catapult reports.