Ocean energy is a relevant source of clean renewable energy, and as it is still facing challenges related to its above grid-parity costs, tariffs intended to support in a structured and coherent way are of great relevance and potential impact. The logistics and marine operations required for installing and maintaining these systems are major cost drivers of marine renewable energy projects. Planning the logistics of marine energy projects is a highly complex and intertwined process, and to date, limited advances have been made in the development of decision support tools suitable for ocean energy farm design. The present paper describes the methodology of a novel, opensource, logistic and marine operation planning tool, integrated within DTOceanPlus suite of design tools, and responsible for producing logistic solutions comprised of optimal selections of vessels, port terminals, equipment, as well as operation plans, for ocean energy projects. Infrastructure selection logistic functions were developed to select vessels, ports, and equipment for specific projects. A statistical weather window model was developed to estimate operation delays due to weather. A vessel charter rate modeling approach, based on an in-house vessel database and industry experience, is described in detail. The overall operation assumptions and underlying operating principles of the statistical weather window model, maritime infrastructure selection algorithms, and cost modeling strategies are presented. Tests performed for a case study based a theoretical floating wave energy converter produced results in good agreement with reality.

A coherent set of functional and technical requirements have been developed for the DTOceanPlus suite of design tools based on analysis of gaps between the current state-of-the-art tools, learning from the original DTOcean project, and the stakeholder expectations identified in the user consultation survey. The technical requirements in this document are translated from the general requirements for the overall suite of tools, and specific requirements (functional, operational, user, interfacing, and data) for the Structured Innovation design tool that has been developed as part of this project. These requirements relate to detailed technical requirements of the technology and environment, for the development, maintenance, support and execution of the software specifications to best meet the needs of the ocean energy industry.

A coherent set of requirements have been developed for the DTOceanPlus suite of design tools based on analysis of gaps between tools in mature industries and those in the ocean energy industry, learning from the original DTOcean project, and the stakeholder expectations identified in the user consultation exercise. The technical requirements in this document are translated from the general requirements for the overall suite of tools, and specific requirements (functional, operational, user, interfacing, and data) for the Stage Gate design tool that will be developed as part of this project.

The objective of Task 4.3 was to carry out the testing of the Stage Gate design tool in order to verify that it meets all the previously defined requirements (in WP2 and T4.1). This report documents the outcome of T4.3 “Verification of the Stage Gate design tool.”

This report describes the methodology used to define the “validation scenarios”, accounting for the different potential use cases. Given the large number of permutations of tools, use cases, and the set of minimum validation requirements, the number of validation scenarios has been reduced to a number that can be run during the life of the DTOceanPlus project but that are sufficient to fully demonstrate the functionality of the DTOceanPlus suite of tools. The selection process, based on a successive approximation approach, has led to the cases that the potential users in the DTOceanPlus consortium have considered as the most relevant for the sector. In Section 4 of the document, the selected validation scenarios is described; the definition of these scenarios has been completed during the project to ensure that the most updated information is used.

This document is the first annual report on dissemination and communication activities regarding DTOceanPlus project.

This document summarizes both the module functionalities and the more technical aspects of the code implemented in the station keeping module.

This document serves as the technical manual of the alpha version of the energy transformation module. It includes all the data requirements, main functions, interfaces and all the pertinent technical details describing the alpha version of the module for the energy transformation of an array of wave energy converters or tidal energy converters.

A coherent set of requirements have been developed for the DTOceanPlus suite of design tools based on analysis of gaps between the current state-of-the-art tools, learning from the DTOcean project, and the stakeholder expectations identified in the user consultation exercise. The requirements in this document are split into general requirements for the overall suite of tools, and specific requirements (functional, operational, user, interfacing, and data) for each of the design tools that is developed as part of this, which are split by work package and task. They act as user specifications for the tool development work packages, and focus the development effort to best meet the needs of the ocean energy industry. Subsequent tasks of the DTOceanPlus project develop these requirements into more detailed technical requirements and software specifications, prior to software coding and integration, then testing and validation.

This document is the third annual report on dissemination and communication activities regarding DTOceanPlus project.