After investigating methods for reducing power fluctuations in wave energy parks, five Swedish scientists published their findings in AIP Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy in July 2014.
“One of the major challenges in constructing effective and economically viable wave energy parks is to reduce the large fluctuations in power output,” the scientists said in the abstract.
Malin Göteman, Jens Engström, Mikael Eriksson, Jan Isberg and Mats Leijon from the Division of Electricity, Department of Engineering Sciences, Uppsala University, have studied different methods for the reduction of power fluctuations and thus improvement of the output power quality.
“Our results show that, e.g., the fluctuations as well as power per device decrease strictly with the number of interacting units, when the separating distance is kept constant.
“However, including more devices in a park with fixed area will not necessarily result in lowered power fluctuations. We also show that varying the distance between units affects the power fluctuations to a much larger extent than it affects the magnitude of the absorbed power,” the abstract reads.
The full paper can be found here .
Offshore WIND Staff; Image: Ricardo (Illustration)