Waterpower Week to host wave and tidal workshops

The US Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office and its national laboratories will host five co-located events dedicated to wave and tidal energy during the upcoming Waterpower Week conference.

The events have been set up to showcase the important work driving the marine and hydrokinetic energy (MHK) innovation forward as part of the three-day conference which brings NHA, IMREC, and METS conferences into a single event.

The Waterpower Week lasts from May 1-3, 2017, and will be held in Washington.

The first day of the conference will feature a workshop on advanced wave energy converter (WEC) dynamics and controls.

It will be followed by an event set up for May 3, that will feature discussions on the environmental compliance efforts for licensing, permitting, and implementation of MHK projects.

The third day of the conference will also include a workshop on a WEC-array simulation tool called SNL-SWAN (Sandia National Laboratories – Simulating WAves Nearshore). The SNL-SWAN development team will give an overview of the SNL-SWAN code, focused on its application to modeling the effects of wave farms on wave environment.

Another open-source simulation tool for wave energy will be discussed at a separate event to be held the same day. The WEC-Sim (Wave Energy Converter SIMulator) development team, consisting of researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Sandia National Laboratories, will give an overview of the WEC-Sim code, with a focus on its application to model the performance of wave energy converters.

The last MHK-dedicated event of the Waterpower Week will discuss how the development of the MHK sector can be accelerated by improving the sharing of information in terms of data, experience, and lessons learned within the industry.