Giorgi, Simone and Ringwood, John (2013) Can Tidal Current Energy Provide Base Load? Energies (6). pp. 2840-2858. ISSN 1996-1073

Download (7MB)

Abstract

Tidal energy belongs to the class of intermittent but predictable renewable energy sources. In this paper, we consider a compact set of geographically diverse locations, which have been assessed to have significant tidal stream energy, and attempt to find the degree to which the resource in each location should be exploited so that the aggregate power from all locations has a low variance. An important characteristic of the locations chosen is that there is a good spread in the peak tidal flow times, though the geographical spread is relatively small. We assume that the locations, all on the island of Ireland, can be connected together and also assume a modular set of tidal turbines. We employ multi-objective optimisation to simultaneously minimise variance, maximise mean power and maximise minimum power. A Pareto front of optimal solutions in the form of a set of coefficients determining the degree of tidal energy penetration in each location is generated using a genetic algorithm. While for the example chosen the total mean power generated is not great (circa 100 MW), the case study demonstrated a methodology that can be applied to other location sets that exhibit similar delays between peak tidal flow times.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	The original version of this article is available at doi:10.3390/en6062840 . © 2013 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
Keywords:	tidal stream energy; electricity generation; power base load; multi-objective optimisation
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Electronic Engineering Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Centre for Ocean Energy Research
Item ID:	4425
Depositing User:	Professor John Ringwood
Date Deposited:	17 Jul 2013 15:28
Journal or Publication Title:	Energies
Publisher:	MDPI AG
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

Repository Staff Only(login required)

Item control page

Downloads

Origin of downloads