This Annex will facilitate the exchange and assessment of ocean energy project information and experience from participating member countries in order to foster a better understanding and accelerate the development of ocean energy technologies. At this early stage of ocean energy development there are many different configurations for marine energy converters and they each have their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, there are many competing approaches for modeling and testing these devices individually, or in arrays, at subscale and at full size. Furthermore, there are no generally accepted methodologies for design and cost analysis of these ocean energy machines.

The sharing of project data and computational assessment methods will allow the participants to determine the most promising approaches for analysis, design, testing, cost estimation, and operation of these devices based on the collective experience of the group. This will facilitate of an understanding of the current state of the ocean energy industry world-wide, and provide the ability to determine the expected performance of a device, and ultimately, the potential to achieve competitive cost of electricity (COE) as new systems evolve.

The United States had developed this proposed Annex to complement national program initiatives undertaken over the past year and planned over the next several years. The US recently awarded 27 projects for marine energy device development, that were specifically structured to yield valuable performance data to instruct and guide the establishment of program goals in terms of overall energy production and COE. Further, the projects will inform continued down-select of technologies and decisions on the use and emphasis of resource characteristics. These projects will be the basis of the US input towards device design and performance, and it is expected that other participating countries will provide corresponding information and experiences on their projects and investments.

In addition to the grants provided for technology development, the US is evaluating the technical, environmental, and economic performance of 8 to 10 representative marine energy devices, including designs for energy production from wave, tidal, river and ocean currents. Through analyses and scale model tests, the project assesses the performance, dynamic behavior, cost of energy, and potential environmental impact of the devices in complex marine environments. In addition, the project provides open source information on key cost drivers, to facilitate more rapid design optimization and provide engineering inputs for the congressionally mandated techno-economic assessment of marine energy technologies.

The proposed Annex will supplement this effort, and like efforts in participating member countries, both with the infusion of resource and performance data, and the sharing of computational methods and techniques that will result in greater ability to validate and compare designs, which in turn will assist the optimization of systems and subsystems. It is a necessary element of the annex that data and design methods from all available sources be shared and reviewed, with an aim of arriving at compatible, best practice assessments of technologies and design approaches.  

Clearly, the challenges of assessing this broad ocean energy knowledge base, modeling and testing capability are significant, and the success of this effort is reliant on a thorough understanding of the resource characteristics, the fluid-device interaction, and the mechanical conversion of the captured energy to electricity. These challenges are certainly difficult for the device designer, but are many times more difficult for government agencies and potential private investors, as they attempt to compare and contrast one device to another, both to project the role that ocean energy may assume in their portfolios, and to choose from among the designs for the best alternative for a particular site. The products of this annex will provide a basis for selection and investment in the most promising technologies and device designs.

After an initial Task I planning meeting, the approach for this annex will be to separate the work into two major tasks. During Task II, all required resource and device performance data will be defined and methods for data capture will be detailed. The data that is compiled and applied will be selected with the primary objective of providing insight into inputs and outputs of the full range of devices and their ability to achieve competitive cost of electricity (COE) production. A critical part of this effort will be the development of a contracting approach that ensures the sharing of performance data among participating countries (though without direct public release of project-specific information) for all publicly funded projects. The development of specific contractual language that ensures wide dissemination of device performance data will be jointly developed as a means of ensuring that future government programs in the participating countries provide essential information to foster the acceleration of promising technologies, and, conversely, the early recognition and abandonment of inferior projects.

This task will establish a common understanding of data requirements among the participant countries to ensure that data will be presented and compiled in a manner that is understood and usable for establishing the state of present ocean energy conversion capability. Further, Task II will establish methods that provide a means of effecting design improvements to achieve energy conversion within cost parameters that make ocean energy an attractive alternative.

Task II will proceed with additional working group meetings to refine data requirements and methods of reducing the data to device or system performance and cost, ultimately resulting in a consensus method of determining the cost of electricity. The follow-on working group meetings will be interspersed after the first Task III presentation of projects, so as to leverage knowledge and lessons learned from the project workshop in continuing to clarify data definition needs (see schedule below).

Task III would be devoted to collecting and reviewing specific project results, information, experience, and data from individual projects currently being sponsored by the participating countries. These review workshops are envisioned to be held to allow the presentation of publically funded project information including: designs methods, modeling methods and results, experimental designs and testing results, specific costing studies, and environmental studies and experiments. Generally, any publically funded ocean energy project should be considered for presentation at one of the workshops. The resulting information would be included in the assessment of the knowledge base for ocean energy.

Each workshop will be documented by a workshop report that contains the presentations presented, a summary of the discussions, and any resulting immediate conclusions. These reports would be available to annex participants, but these working documents would not be released to the public or any non-participants. The compilation of data, excepting proprietary data excluded by the developer of the subject devices, would be made available to participating developers. This would include non-proprietary design methods and techniques, such as the reference models being developed under the US Department of Energy.

An appropriate project for presentation in a Task II workshop could cover a wide spectrum of funded activity for advancing the development of ocean energy devices.

These may include:

• Development of a specific device or family of devices, including design methods and techniques, testing procedures, instrumentation to measure resource inflow and outflow, performance measurement methods, and data obtained to assess test conditions, environmental impact, and device performance.
   
• Development of design tools, including code development and benchmarking.
   
• The establishment of computational models to assess the performance of ocean energy devices and to identify device design parameters that derive the overall performance and efficiency of devices. These models may focus on specific components or subsystems of an ocean energy device, or apply to the overall performance of a device.

It is estimated that each exchange workshop could cover four technical project presentations over a two day period with the presentations making up the report, which would be distributed to the Annex participants covered by any needed confidentiality agreements. Time would be allotted at the exchange workshops to discuss the results and place them in perspective. Over the two year period four such Exchange Workshops could be held covering a total of possibly 16 individual project presentations.

Specific project proprietary information and data would be protected from public disclosure through non-disclosure agreements, but the general conclusions derived from the data would be used to develop knowledge assessments for a final report, and these general results would be released in the public domain.

Assessments and any modeling results, experimental techniques, and methodologies would be publically released, where not protected by confidentiality agreements, or where approval for release can be obtained from the owners of the information.