Effect of energy storage on a combined wind and wave energy farm

The combined installation of wind and wave energy converters is being proposed more and more often as a solution to exploit the potential complementarity between these two natural resources and to share the costs of their offshore infrastructures. This paper uses real meteorological data to evaluate the difference in the power performance of a single wind turbine and a combined wind/wave energy farm. The proposed case study considers a wind turbine coupled to wave arrays including a different number of point absorbers and the importance of an optimized tuning of the Wave Energy Converters to maximize the output power is shown. As a further step it is assumed that the farm is equipped with an energy storage device. The impact of its power and energy rating and of its efficiency on the achievable smoothing of the output power is analyzed.