OES Annual Report 2012 - Ocean Energy Systems

114
Testing & Pilot Projects
100
Projected Commercial Opening Cost
- No Innovation (26 ¢/kWh)
COST OF ELECTRICITY (¢/KWH)
10
Hawaii CoE Target 13.8 ¢/kWh
Lower 48 CoE Target 6-7 ¢/kWh
85% Learning Curve
Commercial Opening Cost - Accelerated
Innovation through advanced Research
Development & Demonstration
1
1 10 100 1,000 10,000 100,000
CUMULATIVE INSTALLED CAPACITY (MH)
FIGURE 6: Potential cost-reduction pathways
Programmatic R&D Needs
The above areas for innovation can only be attained if strong RD&D programs are in place that nurture
this early industry. Although there are no programmatic silver bullets, these guiding principles should be
pursued to ensure success:
ÌÌ
Clear focus on cost-reduction pathways -- Continued benchmarking of technology innovations with
respect to their contributions to reducing the CoE is an important factor in identifying solid cost-reduction
pathways and measuring program success. It is important that such benchmarking occurs by modeling
commercial-scale arrays from a performance, cost, and economic point of view. Cost drivers at commercial
scale are different from the cost drivers at pilot scale, and it is important to engage in the design and
optimization process with the end goal in mind.
ÌÌ
Demonstration and validation -- Demonstration projects allow the design community to develop a
comprehensive understanding of all the elements contributing to the CoE of a particular technology. It is
important to transfer the knowledge gained from these demonstrations to the development community
so novel design concepts can incorporate those lessons without having to repeat their mistakes. An
independent test and validation program can go a long way toward achieving that goal. While this has
proven to be difficult to implement, given the commercially sensitive nature of this type of activity, it is a
critical ingredient to accelerating technology innovation. Such independent validation work can then be
fed back as lessons learned into computational codes and design standards.
ÌÌ
Development of strong theoretical modeling capabilities -- The key difference between engineering
capabilities existing 30 years ago and today is that modern computing capabilities allow rapid simulation
and trade-off studies to be performed on devices that would have required extensive physical testing
in the past. Moore’s law, which predicted that computational capabilities double every 18 months, has
largely held true over the last 30 years (back to when wind power was in its infancy). Over this 30-year
period, this yields a millionfold improvement in computational capabilities. By far the most fundamental
technological difference today, theoretical modeling allows innovation cycles to be accelerated, enabling
ANNUAL
REPORT 2012