Last week, on the 15th and 16th March, the EVOLVE consortium conducted three regional workshops to present the EVOLVE project and initial country-scale power systems modelling methods and results. We engaged with 45 stakeholders over 21 organisations, receiving useful feedback and data to refine our systems value studies.
The EVOLVE project aims to study the potential benefits that wave and tidal energy can bring to European power systems, producing quantifiable results in terms of the costs and carbon savings associated with deploying ocean energy into future low-carbon energy mixes. The country-scale modelling covers three regions: Great Britain, Ireland and Portugal, and a separate stakeholder engagement workshop has been conducted for each of these regions.
The initial modelling results have found a consistent pattern when including wave and tidal deployments in high renewable 2030 future energy scenarios. For each of the three regions, increasing the deployed capacity of ocean energy results in a decrease in system dispatch costs and in annual carbon emissions. This is due to the offsetting of wave and tidal resource with more established renewable energy solutions such as wind and solar PV. It has been found that this offsetting results in a more consistently available renewable generation profile with higher proportions of ocean energy deployments, enabling lower dispatch requirements for expensive, carbon-intensive fossil fuel generation.
The EVOLVE stakeholder workshops have provided valuable feedback in the ongoing studies, allowing the EVOLVE consortium to refine the assumptions associated with future deployment scenarios, fossil fuel generation, and alternative energy vectors such as storage and hydrogen generation. Further discussion on the scenarios, sensitivities and metrics are already producing EVOLVE project outputs which are of use to a greater range of stakeholders.
The EVOLVE consortium would like to thank the stakeholders who have already taken part in the consultation and would welcome any and all further feedback from those who would like to get involved.