Ocean Energy can play an important role in addressing one of the EU’s biggest challenges: providing clean, affordable and sustainable energy. However, ocean energy technologies are not yet mature enough to overcome all challenges related to performance, reliability, survivability, and resulting cost of energy. DTOceanPlus will accelerate the commercialisation of the Ocean Energy sector by developing and demonstrating an open source suite of design tools for the selection, development, deployment and assessment of ocean energy systems (including sub-systems, energy capture devices and arrays). This will align innovation and development processes with those used in mature engineering sectors. - Technology concept selection will be facilitated by a Structured Innovation tool. - Technology development will be enabled by a Stage-Gate tool. - Technology deployment will be supported by a 2nd generation of the FP7 DTOcean tools. This suite of design tools will reduce the technical and financial risks of the technology to achieve the deployment of cost-competitive wave and tidal arrays. DTOceanPlus will underpin a rapid reduction in the Levelised Cost of Energy offered by facilitating improvement in the reliability, performance and survivability of ocean energy systems and analysing the impact of design on energy yield, O&M and the environment, thus making the sector more attractive for private investment. These objectives and impacts will be achieved through the implementation of 9 work packages covering user engagement, tool development, demonstration of tools against real projects (thus outputting a suite of tools at TRL 6), analysis of supply chains and potential markets, exploitation, dissemination and education. The DTOceanPlus consortium has been formed to include representatives of all key user and stakeholder groups. It includes all core partners from the FP7 DTOcean project along with the developers of Europe’s leading ocean energy sub-systems, devices and arrays.

Europe is endowed with abundant wave energy which could cover some 10% of its electricity needs with a clean, predictable and job-creating resource, which EU companies are at the forefront exploiting with little dependence on foreign suppliers. There remain important technical challenges to bring down costs to within investors’ reach, as a top priority open-sea operating experience must be analysed to permit the focus of R&D efforts on identifying and solving problems uncovered in open-sea deployments. However, to this day, most wave energy R&D does not have access to open-sea operating data as they are not shared by the companies that sponsored open-sea tests. OPERA will remove this roadblock by collecting and sharing two years of open-sea operating data of a floating oscillating water column wave energy converter. In addition the project will be the first open-sea deployment for four cost-reducing innovations that will be advanced from TRL3-4 to TRL5. Together, these four innovations have a long-term cost reduction potential of over 50%. These are: a 50% more efficient turbine, latching and predictive control, a shared mooring system for wave energy similar to those that have reduced mooring costs 50% in aquaculture, and an elastomeric mooring tether that reduces peak loads at the hull-mooring connection 70% and thus addresses one of the most pressing challenges for structural survivability of wave energy devices. Documenting and sharing this open-sea experience will also induce a step-change in our knowledge of risk and uncertainties, costs and societal and environmental impacts of wave energy. The consortium brings together world leaders in wave energy research from four European countries and the IPR owner and most advanced teams to exploit each of these innovations. Last but not least, the project brings national in-cash co-financing of over €2 million to directly fund the open-sea testing.

The VALID project will develop and validate a new test rig platform and procedures for accelerated hybrid testing that can be used across the wave energy sector to improve the reliability and survivability of the components and subsystems that form Wave Energy Converters (WECs). The methodology for accelerated hybrid testing combines both physical testing (physical test rigs) and virtual testing (simulated environment, numerical models and data). The VALID Hybrid Test Platform (VHTP) will become the interface that allows for seamless accelerated hybrid testing. With the long-term goal of establishing a standard for future use and making a step-change impact on the sector, the new test rig platform and methodology will be validated for a variety of WECs, critical components and subsystems through three different user cases. Often faults in component and subsystems are detected through extensive and costly sea testing in late stages of device development (high TRLs) and finding a problem at late development stages can add significant cost and delays to initial schedules, eventually leading to company’s bankruptcy. Sound testing methods are thus needed to reduce the uncertainties, increase confidence in results, assist and guide the concept and subcomponents design, and thus largely assist in the decision-making progress. The new hybrid testing platform with open access for models, testbeds and improved data management are all necessary to lower the cost on future technologies. VALID assembles the full value chain required from methodology and platform development (AVL, Aquatera), technology development (Corpower, IDOM, Wavepiston), LCOE (Julia F Chosaz Consult Engineering) to certification bodies (RINA-C) in order to develop an integrated solution with support from RTO (RISE, Tecnalia, Bimep) and academia (Aalborg University, TUDelft).