The commercial advancement of 16 MW offshore wave power generation technologies in the southwest of the UK

This paper presents the work carried out to develop the Wave Hub project off the coast of southwest of the UK, which represents the world´s first large-scale wave energy farm. Four companies have been chosen to deploy their own particular wave-energy converters. These include the Pelamis, the Overtopping Device, the Multiple Point Absorber System, and the Oscillating Water Column. The work focuses on integrating offshore wave energy plant into the UK electrical grid and finds the optimum configuration for grid -integration of multiple WEC devices. It discusses how to mitigate the grid integration challenges associated with 16MW commercial implementation of offshore wave energy technologies in terms of voltage and reactive power control and investigates their impact on electrical networks.