A techno-economic assessment of wave energy resources in the Philippines

Abstract

The Philippines is currently addressing its growing concerns on how to meet its ballooning energy demand in parallel on having a good energy mix in terms of its renewable and non-renewable resources. As of 2016, according to the Department of Energy (DOE) of the country, roughly 76% of the Philippines’ sources of energy came from fossil fuels and the remaining percent was mainly attributable to the renewables. Interestingly, ocean energy is still not part of the current energy mix.The main focus of the study is to see the technical and economic feasibility of harnessing energy coming from waves. Specifically, this work intends to point out and quantify the potential sites to deploy Wave Energy Converters (WECs) relative to the resource profile of specific locations situated in the five coastal regions of the Philippines. Three WECs were assessed such as AquaBuoy, Pelamis and Wave Dragon in consideration of their advance Technology Readiness Level (TRL). Furthermore, data needed for estimating the resource potential of each site came from Surf-Forecast – a website providing wave profile forecast based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Wave Watch 3 (WW3) model. Data were gathered for one year on a 3-h interval per day. Meanwhile, prior to assessment, the data were first validated by the hindcast data of MetOceanView – a high resolution web-based weather forecasting tool using MetOcean Solutions Ltd WW3 Tolman Chalicov (MSL WW3 TC) wave model and NOAA Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) for the wind model.Results revealed that there is around 10 − 20 kW/m of wave energy flux scattered in various coastal areas of the Philippines. Lastly, the economic impact of developing wave project has been assessed considering base case, optimistic and pessimistic scenarios to be able to account for any possible uncertainties.