Abstract
In January 2013 the project titled “Increasing reliability and reducing maintenance on Wavestar wave energy plants in order to reduce the Cost of Energy” was initiated. The project is running over two years, January 2013 to December 2014. The project is subsidized by the Energinet.dk ForskVE program, project no. 12110. The project is an extension of the successful completion of the ForskVE project 2009-1-10305, which ended in December 2012. The previous project was spilt in two phases “Phase 1” and “Phase 2”, and for this reason the new project is termed “Phase 3”. An overview of the purpose for three phases is given below:
- Phase 1, May 2010 to September 2011: Focus was to demonstrate that the hydraulic power was higher than a specified target power performance curve. Phase 1 was finished in September 2011 where 14754 valid ten minute records with power production higher than the specifications, were recorded, documented and approved by EnergiNet.dk.
- Phase 2, October 2012 to December 2012 (three months): Emphasis was on the electrical energy. In phase 2 the capability of the machine to deliver the expected number of electrical kWh’s in a three month period was documented. Phase 2 was completed after phase 1 was completed when the machine was ready for automatic continuous unmanned operation.
- Phase 3, January 2013 to December 2014 (two years). The purpose of the project is to continue operation and development of the Wavestar Demonstrator at Hanstholm with the focus on increasing the life time and reducing operating and maintenance costs, thus improving the overall Cost of Energy. This will be achieved through a targeted collection of statistics on maintenance and time consumption, and the subsequent replacement, testing and optimization of the critical components. The goal is to minimize the number of service calls and downtime on the upcoming full-scale machine in the open sea.
Every month since May 2010 Wavestar has published a monthly report with a summary of the achieved results and activities at the Wavestar demonstrator at Hanstholm. The monthly reports are supplemented by an Excel file containing data records with all the raw data presented in tables and figures.