A first version of stakeholders’ requirements for wave energy converters plants

International audienceWave energy converter (WEC) technology development as a whole has to date not yet delivered the desired commercial maturity nor, and more importantly, the techno-economic performance. Both commercial readiness and economic viability are required for successful entry into and survival in the market. The ways in which WEC technology have been and are being developed have been analyzed in [1] and [2]. The key deficiencies with these approaches have been recognized and the fundamental requirements for successful WEC technology development have been identified. Technology development progress, technology value and technology funding have largely been measured, associated with and driven by technology readiness, measured in Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). Originating primarily from the Space and Defense industries, the TRLs focus on procedural implementation of technology developments of large and complex engineering challenges where cost is neither mission critical nor a key design driver. In order to compensate for this deficiency, Technology Performance Levels (TPLs) have been introduced in [1] and further detailed in [2] as a technoeconomic performance assessment metric for WEC technology. Possible further refinement of the TPL assessment methodology is the subject of another paper presented at this conference [3]. WEC technology concept innovation has predominantly been driven by intuitive methods and expressed with respect to overall system concept ideas. In 2014, NREL and SNL started a project that will apply Innovation Techniques from System Engineering to innovate novel WEC technology solutions aiming to identify WEC technologies with high commercial potential. In this aim, it is essential to develop a comprehensive specification of WEC functional requirements. This paper describes first results of this work. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to formulate functional requirements for WECs at the wave energy plant level. In [4], functional requirements were formulated in the wave energy conversion context, but only for the mooring system. Even in a more mature industry such as wind energy, only one reference was found dealing only with technical requirements for grid connection of wind energy plants [5]