Timeseries inputs/outputs for marine hydrokinetic power

I am wondering if the SAM team has considered adding functionality to simulate 8760 generation profiles for marine tidal and wave resources in the future?

I am working with a California utility to identify future portfolios that could supply 100% time coincident renewable energy on an 8760 basis, and we are interested in knowing if the generation profile for wave and tidal could help complement other resources.

In my basic research on this topic so far, I've found two main sources of data for wave and tidal current data:

Tidal Current Data: NOAA's Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services provides an API to access much of its data, including current velocity data: api.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/api/prod/#products

Wave data: it appears that hourly wave height and period data can be downloaded from NOAA's National Buoy Data Center. I have not been able to find an API, but they do provide this information about accessing historical data: www.ndbc.noaa.gov/archive.shtml

Hi Greg,

SAM's Marine Energy model are being actively developed, so you can expect to see improvements and new features over the next few versions. NREL's marine energy research is described here, along with a list of available datasets: www.nrel.gov/water/marine-energy.html .

As time series resource data becomes available, I expect SAM's marine energy wave and tidal models will have options to use that as input, similar to the Wind Power model, which can use either a time series wind resource file, or a statistical characterization of the resource.

Best regards,
Paul.

Hi Paul,

I just wanted to check back in to check on the progress of adding marine energy generation timeseries data to SAM (which I suppose depends on whether any new time series resource data has become available since last summer).

Thank you,

Greg

Hi Greg,

An option to run the Marine Wave model in time series mode should be available with the Fall 2021 version of SAM. We've completed some work on that project as described here: github.com/NREL/SAM/pull/645 .

We are also working to integrate access to a new time series wave resource data set available from the NREL Developer API here: developer.nrel.gov/docs/wave/ .

Best regards,
Paul.

Hi Paul, thank you for the update. This is good news! Out of curiousity, is there similar work taking place for tidal resources, or is the focus on wave energy for now?

Hi Greg,

The focus is on wave energy now because of the availability of time series wave resource data.

Best regards,
Paul.