Techno-Economic Assessment of Offshore Wind and Hybrid Wind-Wave Farms with Energy Storage Systems

Ocean renewables (such as offshore wind and wave) are abundant and essential energy resources for supporting future emission-free targets. However, their energy intermittency and high cost have hindered commercialization and wide-scale implementations of these ocean energy technologies. This paper focuses on both issues and aims to increase the dispatchability of ocean energy farm, by investigating the potential of a hybrid wind and wave energy platform with various energy storage systems (ESSs). In the paper, a novel method is proposed to assess the ESS for an offshore renewable energy farm to guarantee the energy dispatchability to the local demand. The effect of two farm configurations on the ESS capacity is analysed: one involves wind turbines only and the other one uses a hybrid configuration (with wind and wave generation subsystems). Lifecycle cost models of energy farms are developed and the economic feasibility of different energy storage systems are investigated. The sensitivity of energy farm configurations and the energy storage systems to the resource characteristics at multiple locations are also studied. The results indicate that the combined wind and wave energy farm significantly reduces the energy storage system capacity requirement and provides competitive lifecycle costs compared to the stand-alone wind energy farm, though the amount of these benefits vary on the local resource characteristics. In addition, it was concluded that the Lithium-ion battery option in a combined energy farm offers better overall performance over the other storage options considered