D8.3 LiftWEC LCoE Calculation Tool


Download Deliverable D8.3

The focus of Task 8.3 has been the refinement of the LiftWEC Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) Calculation Tool, incorporating a range of improvements including an updated database of costs developed under Task 8.1 and the parametric cost model developed under Task 8.2.

The LiftWEC LCOE Calculation Tool has been updated and refined including new features and improvements according to the project scope. These have been developed based on internal discussions within the LiftWEC Consortium. The refinements and their rationale will be detailed and described throughout this document.

The deliverable 8.3 encompasses two integrated elements:

  • The User Guide of how to use LiftWEC Calculation Tool.
  • The LiftWEC LCOE Calculation Tool, which is an open-access excel-spreadsheet, (available at https://liftwec.com/deliverables/).

Within the LiftWEC project and specifically in WP8, discussions have been held regularly to address the needs of the Tool to accurately and realistically evaluate the economic feasibility of the different LiftWEC configurations being proposed. An internal workshop was held to present the LCOE Tool to all LiftWEC project participants and collect feedback from the different WPs.

Overall, the scope of the LiftWEC LCOE Calculation Tool is to estimate the Cost of Energy of a specific LiftWEC concept based on its performance in a specified wave location and based on its costs.

The unique feature of the LiftWEC LCOE Tool is that it provides default values for different types of material or PTO costs, which allows comparable economic estimates to be drawn even at an early development stage (the LiftWEC project is advancing from TRL1 to TRL3/4).

One sheet of the Excel Tool considers a Single WEC. This is a first prototype to be i.e. installed at a test site (no electrical infrastructure is considered for example). Another sheet considers the Wave Energy Farm as a pre-commercial farm with an installed capacity in the range of 10 MW, i.e. composed by 5 to 20 WECs (as a very general estimate). Calculations of larger wave farms can then be estimated using Learning Curves.

The authors acknowledge that there is a large uncertainty in absolute terms and it is very challenging to provide a single unit cost as default value representative to all LiftWEC concepts. For example, a single value of 240.000 EUR for the installation of a floating configuration including mooring, umbilical cable and WEC deployment might be 50% inaccurate in some deployments. As a result, the Tool provides an error estimate, which again, shall also be considered as an estimate.

Project costs depend on several parameters intrinsic to the concept and its design characteristics. For example, the type of station keeping, the distance to shore, the water depth, the deployment location, the installation method, weather windows, the type of mooring, are all parameters which will highly influence project costs. By providing default values the authors have aimed at providing reasonable orders of magnitude which can help to draw first economic calculations. It is however expected that these default values are mainly used at low TRLs or first economic assessments, and that at higher TRLs, own expertise and knowledge will be used to overwrite the default values inserted in the Tool, which may be overwritten using input from other work packages when this information becomes available.