Ocean energy is a relevant source of clean renewable energy, and as it is still facing challenges related to its above grid-parity costs, tariffs intended to support in a structured and coherent way are of great relevance and potential impact. The logistics and marine operations required for installing and maintaining these systems are major cost drivers of marine renewable energy projects. Planning the logistics of marine energy projects is a highly complex and intertwined process, and to date, limited advances have been made in the development of decision support tools suitable for ocean energy farm design. The present paper describes the methodology of a novel, opensource, logistic and marine operation planning tool, integrated within DTOceanPlus suite of design tools, and responsible for producing logistic solutions comprised of optimal selections of vessels, port terminals, equipment, as well as operation plans, for ocean energy projects. Infrastructure selection logistic functions were developed to select vessels, ports, and equipment for specific projects. A statistical weather window model was developed to estimate operation delays due to weather. A vessel charter rate modeling approach, based on an in-house vessel database and industry experience, is described in detail. The overall operation assumptions and underlying operating principles of the statistical weather window model, maritime infrastructure selection algorithms, and cost modeling strategies are presented. Tests performed for a case study based a theoretical floating wave energy converter produced results in good agreement with reality.

This report documents the outcome of the verification of the assessment design tools. The goal of the verification task was to ensure that the tools: respond correctly to a varied set of inputs; perform their functions in an acceptable time and reasonable use of computational resource; are adequate in terms of usability; and, are verified against control data. The following actions were completed for all tools as part of the verification and are described in detail in this report: definition of the verification cases and evaluation criteria; organisation of training sessions for partners; collection of data for each verification case; running the verification cases by partners; analysis of the results based on quantitative and qualitative assessments, creation of a task list of changes that could improve the tool and their performance.

This report outlines the proposed architecture and main functions of the DTOcean mooring and foundation design module and its interaction with other elements and modules of the tool

The aim of this document is to present the activity carried out by the four industrial partners who validated the DTOcean+ suite against five wave energy validation scenarios.

The software generated by the DTOcean project automates the design of a feasible array of ocean energy converters for a relevant geographical location and technology type

The Structured Innovation (SI) design tool forms part of the DTOceanPlus suite of second-generation open source design tools for ocean energy. The SI tool comprises innovation methodologies which can enhance concept creation and selection in ocean energy systems (including sub-systems, energy capture devices and arrays), enabling a structured approach to address complex ocean energy engineering challenges where design options are numerous, and thus it can facilitate efficient evolution from concept to commercialisation.

During the ABIOP project launch meeting, the consortium agreed to add a task to the project aimed at identifying the challenges of biocolonisation in an ORE context. This additional work is indeed necessary because it allows the organisation, updating and presentation of the reflections undertaken by biofouling experts from various industrial and research entities and federated by FEM, for several years on this topic.

Technology readiness levels are a widely used metric of technology maturity and risk for marine renewable energy devices. To-date, a large number of device concepts have been proposed which have reached the early validation stages of development. Only a handful of mature designs have attained pre-commercial development status following prototype sea trials. In order to navigate through the aptly named “valley of death” towards commercial realisation, it is necessary for new technologies to be de-risked in terms of component durability and reliability. In this paper the scope of the reliability assessment module of the DTOcean design tool is outlined including aspects of tool integration, data provision and how prediction uncertainties are accounted for

Proposal of protocols for measuring several biofouling variables (fresh weight in air, fresh weight in water, biovolume, thickness) that were tested during the project.

This document is the third annual report on dissemination and communication activities regarding DTOceanPlus project.