One of the services available at BigDataOcean (BDO) platform is the possibility to run a load match analysis, taking into consideration the foreseen energy generation from a chosen Wave Energy Converter (WEC) and a load profile uploaded by the user.
In this example, a Pelamis WEC was selected, and the foreseen power production of this device was considered, in a location near the Portuguese Coast. In the energy demand side, a real load profile of a Portuguese small area was considered ad the month of September 2018 was analyzed. This area is located nearby the selected offshore location for the assessment of energy generation using the Pelamis.
As can be seen in Figure 1, the power generated by one single Pelamis device is very small, compared to the load profile (in yellow). For the illustrated date of 06/09/2018, at 02:00, the Pelamis device would be generating a total of 76 kW while the Load value is 15240 kW.
Figure 1. Pelamis generation and load demand values (in kW)
In order to perform a quicker analysis of the generation and load time evolution, BDO allows to visualize these using normalized values. These can be seen in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Pelamis generation and load demand values (normalized values)
Because the energy generated by one device alone is quite low compared to the load values, this example considers an array of 100 Pelamis devices, operating in the same conditions, at the deployed location. These demonstrate the example of a Wave farm. Using these 100 devices, the Self-Consumption and the Self-Sufficiency indicators are respectively 98.86 % and 7.1 %. These indicate that 98.86 % of the energy generated by the Wave Farm would feed the load demand, reducing in 7.1 % the need for additional power sources.
BDO platform allows users to upload load profiles and quickly visualize how the generation of a selected WEC technology would correlate with the demand needs, by displaying the previously shown time-series graphs and also by calculating the Self-Consumption and Self-Sufficiency indicators.