On the Nile Fan's Wave Power Potential and Controlling Factors Integrating Spectral and Geostatistical Techniques

Abstract

Wave energy is foreseen to contribute to the 20 % renewable energy supply of Egypt’s electricity budget to meet burgeoning energy demand. This research analyses the Nile Fan wave energy forcasted from numerical modeling for 2020 of the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) database, hourly sampled at 0.042° as the finest remotely-sensed data available. Wave power spatial distribution is analyzed using data from 259 points proposed as Wave Energy Converters (WECs). Spectral analyses techniques were appraised for disclosing the frequency and power return periods of the significant wave height and peak periods and to understand the similarity among selected WECs of varied conditions. K-means clustering was used to distinguish energy classes with large inter-class variances. The obtained wave power resources ( av . 5.32 kW/m; maximum of 112.9 kW/m; annual mean of 46.96 MW/m) are among the largest found in the Mediterranean Sea. More than 98 % of the wave power variance is controlled, in decreasing order of influence, by the depth, distance to shore, significant wave height, wave peak period, and the wave principal direction. Deepest water and near shore classes attained the largest wave power. Detailed environmental factors induced the wave shape and power is concluded.