Assessment of Hybrid Wind-Wave Energy Resource for the NW Coast of Iberian Peninsula in a Climate Change Context

Offshore renewable energy has a high potential for ensuring the successful implementation of the European decarbonization agenda planned for the near future. Hybrid wind-wave farms can reduce installation and maintenance costs, and increase the renewable energy availability of a location by compensating for the wind’s intermittent nature with good wave conditions. In addition, wave farms can provide protection to wind farms, and the combined wind/wave farm can provide coastal protection. This work aims to assess the future hybrid wind-wave energy resource for the northwest coast of Iberian Peninsula for the near future (2026–2045), under the RCP 8.5 greenhouse gas emission scenario. This assessment was accomplished by applying a Delphi classification method to define four categories, aiming to evaluate the richness (wind and wave energy availability, downtime), the variability (temporal variation), the environmental risk (extreme events), and cost parameters (water depth and distance to coast) of the wind and wave resources. The combined index (CI), which classifies the hybrid wind-wave resource, shows that most of the NW Iberian Peninsula presents good conditions (CI > 0.6) for exploiting energy from wind and wave resources simultaneously. Additionally, there are some particularly optimal areas (CI > 0.7), such as the region near Cape Roca, and the Galician coastThe first author of this work has been supported by the Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) through a doctoral grant (SFRH/BD/114919/2016). Thanks are also due to FCT/MCTES for the financial support to CESAM (UIDB/50017/2020+UIDP/50017/2020), through national funds. This work was partially supported by Xunta de Galicia under project ED431C 2017/64-GRC (Grupos de Referencia Competitiva) and by Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Government of Spain under the project “WELCOME ENE2016-75074-C2-1-R” funded by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This study is also part of the project “WECAnet: A pan-European network for Marine Renewable Energy” (CA17105), which received funding from the HORIZON2020 Framework Programme by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), a funding agency for research and innovation networksS