Reliability and Cost Assessment of Critical Components: Electrical generator failure of IDOM wave energy converter

Wave energy technologies must overcome several challenges related to cost, performance and reliability to unleash their full potential. This paper focuses on a selected critical component representative of Oscillating Water Column devices, namely the electric generator; and the assessment is based on the MARMOK wave energy converter. VALID is a 3-year Horizon2020 funded research project. Through VALID, IDOM – the developer of MARMOK - aims at increasing the overall energy conversion by using generators with reduced nominal power that operate at higher peaks with respect to nominal. The present study relates the reliability of the critical component (the generator), its efficiency and the ratio between maximum power and nominal power to a performance and cost analysis of the Wave Energy Converter (WEC). A balance should exist between MARMOK’s capital expenditures, energy yield and generators’ required maintenance. A model is presented in the paper, which will be made publicly available once validated in the three user cases of VALID. This is the first publication of the model and process. Preliminary results are promising, indicating there is an optimal generator sizing that has the potential of minimizing the cost of energy of MARMOK by half.