The objective of this report is to review the existing literature relevant to the early stage evaluation of WECs and propose a set of relevant evaluation criteria for the LiftWEC project.

These criteria will be used throughout the LiftWEC project to evaluate the potential of the different concept candidates and will be adapted to the level of maturity of the proposed concepts. Importantly, the criteria should not be used to evaluate the current stage of development of each concept but its potential to become a successfully commercialised WEC.

This report describes the identification of the selection criteria. The methodology to benchmark and to score each concept against these criteria will be developed and documented in following deliverables related to Task 2.5.

A review of the WEC selection criteria within different ongoing projects has been carried out. The criteria used in such projects are broadly consistent and can be used as a basis of the LiftWEC selection criteria, but they are generally defined from the point of view of an external evaluator of technologies. The criteria are therefore focused on providing an absolute evaluation of a technology, and do not consider the difficulty of developing the concepts up to commercial maturity level (the “developability” of the concept). The interest in conducting a Technology Performance Level (TPL) evaluation of the selected concepts at the end of the LiftWEC project is identified.

Based on this literature review, a specification of the LiftWEC criteria was drawn, emphasising the need to provide relative evaluation between concepts which will be grouped into a tighter design space that the one considered by the reviewed project.

A structured list of selection criteria is provided, with 5 principals thematic: Energy Production, Affordability, Survivability, Developability, Acceptability Each thematic is then divided into criteria. Notes are provided for each criterion to provide some clarification about the criteria selection and its future scoring methodology.