Oscilla Power was recently awarded a $200,000 grant by the US Department of Energy to explore how compressed air energy storage can benefit wave energy converters.
New opportunities for ocean wave energy adoption can be opened up if the inherent power variability associated with wave power generation can be mitigated through storage. Further, larger storage quantities may be able to allow scheduled or offset dispatch; for example, allowing a significant fraction of the energy that is captured during times of high wave intensity in the evening to be provided to the grid during the early AM hours when demand starts to rise and before solar generation can meet this demand.
In this project, Oscilla Power will explore integrating underwater compressed air energy storage (CAES) with its Triton wave energy converter (WEC) to mitigate the above the issues and improve the value of wave energy.
The overarching goal of this Phase 1 SBIR project is to successfully develop a concept design for an energy storage system that can be integrated with OPI’s Triton WEC to provide power smoothing and load balancing functionality. In particular, this will include down-selecting a preliminary concept and approach for energy storage on board the utility-scale Triton system. It will further demonstrate through numerical modeling, the various performance benefits in terms of power smoothing, load balancing and cost advantages that can be offered by co-locating large-scale energy storage with wave energy.
Comments