Assessment of wave energy resources and their associated uncertainties for two coastal areas in Japan
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Assessment of wave energy resources and their associated uncertainties for two coastal areas in Japan Kaushik Sasmal1 · Takuji Waseda1 · Adrean Webb2 · Shogo Miyajima3 · Kunio Nakano4 Received: 5 June 2020 / Accepted: 20 October 2020 © The Japan Society of Naval Architects and Ocean Engineers (JASNAOE) 2020
Abstract At reconnaissance to feasibility study stages of wave energy development, guidelines and standards recommend wave power assessments to be conducted for long periods of time, albeit at relatively coarse spatial resolutions. However, quite often developers need to make a preliminary site selection based on high-resolution information. Unfortunately, even with abundant computational resources nowadays, running a high-resolution coastal model for more than a decade is still not practical. In this paper, we propose to combine uncertainty estimates from a 21-year-long 1-km-resolution model and a high-resolution (10 m nearshore) coastal model to assess wave energy. Two sites in Japan facing the Pacific Ocean were selected for this study. One site located on the southern coast (site-S) is affected more by the passage of typhoons than another site located on the eastern coast (site-E). The estimated wave power climatology at site-S ranges between 3 and 7 kW m−1 with an uncertainty of ± 0.27 to ± 0.51 kW m−1 ; whereas for site-E, the climatology varies between 3 and 9 kW m−1 with uncertainties of ± 0.12 to ± 0.34 kW m−1 . In general, the eastern coastal area of Japan is found to offer higher wave power and lower margins of uncertainty than compared with the southern coastal area. Keywords Wave energy · Resource assessment · Uncertainty · WAVEWATCH III · SWAN
1 Introduction The oceans are source of a tremendous amount of energy and surface waves have great potential for harnessing a substantial amount of marine energy [1]. Ocean wave energy offers significantly higher potential compared to other resources of renewable energies such as wind and solar energies [2]. In addition, the variation of wave energy is small throughout a 24-h cycle and can be predicted using a wave forecast model several days in advance [2, 3]. Resource assessment plays a fundamental role in decision making and in the development of a wave energy project [4]. Several
* Kaushik Sasmal [email protected] 1
Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba, Japan
2
Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
3
Akishima Laboratories (Mitsui Zosen) Inc., Akishima, Japan
4
Tamano Works, Mitsui E&S Steel Structures Engineering Co., Ltd., Okayama, Japan
studies on wave energy resource assessment have been carried out at a global scale (e.g., [5–10]). A large number of studies have also been carried out to investigate wave energy potential at a local scale that covers coastal regions of many countries (e.g., [11–26]). However, there are few examples that have documented the uncertainties that are associated with a wave energy resource. A detailed ov
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