Estimating the Cost of Wave Energy Converters at an Early Design Stage: A Bottom-Up Approach

Abstract

The role of ocean energy is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years, and techno-economic analysis will play a crucial role. Nowadays, despite strong assumptions, the vast majority of studies model costs using a top-down approach (the TdA) that leads to an unrepresentative economic model. WEC developers usually go through the the TdA approach because more detailed cost data are not available at an earlier design stage. At a very advanced design stage, some studies have also proposed techno-economic optimisation based on the bottom-up approach (BuA). This entails that the detailed cost metrics presented in the literature are very specific to the WEC type (hence not applicable to other cases) or unrepresentative. This lack of easily accessible detailed cost functions in the current state of the art leads to ineffective optimisations at an earlier stage of WEC development. In this paper, a BuA for WECs is proposed that can be used for techno-economic optimisation at the early design stage. To achieve this goal, cost functions of most common components in the WEC field are retrieved from the literature, exposed, and critically compared. The large number of components considered allows the results of this work to be applied to a vast pool of WECs. The novelty of the presented cost functions is their parameterization with respect to the technological specifications, which already enables their adoption in the design optimisation phase. With the goal of quantifying the results and critically discuss the differences between the TdA and the BuA, the developed methodology and cost functions are applied to a case study and specifically adopted for the calculation of the capital cost of PeWEC (pendulum wave energy converter). In addition, a hybrid approach (HyA) is presented and discussed as an intermediate approach between the TdA and the BdA. Results are compared in terms of capital expenditure (CapEx) and pie cost distribution: the impact of adopting different cost metrics is discussed, highlighting the role that reliable cost functions can have on early stage technology development. This paper proposes more than 50 cost functions for WEC components. Referring to the case study, it is shown that while the total cost differs only slightly (11%), the pie distribution changes by up to 22%. Mooring system and power take-off are the cost items where the TdA and the HyA differ more from the BuA cost estimate.