As part of the three-year 2012-2014 System Research, the “Wind and Marine Electricity” project addresses research issues related to two energy sources that are and can be a part of the energy mix in Italy and in Europe in general, in order to meet the renewable energy production targets set for 2020 and beyond.
The two sectors under consideration, wind energy and marine motion, are very different in terms of the level of knowledge, the maturity of the technology and the number of existing installations. In fact, wind energy (with installations on land) has already undergone considerable development over the last 20 years, both in Italy and abroad, while the sector of renewable energy production from marine motion, and in particular from wave motion, has only recently achieved an acceleration, thanks to numerous technological experimentation and development projects, bringing it closer to the commercial phase.
For the development of both sectors, it is essential to have as detailed and accurate a knowledge as possible of the characteristics of the resource and its geographical distribution. The assessment of the resource present in a given area is obtained through the application of modeling chains, but it is essential to have the largest possible number of high quality field measurements, suitable for energy production assessment, which can be used in the initialization/calibration of the models. With regard to marine areas, RSE has been carrying out an anemometric campaign in coastal/insular and offshore areas for several years, supported by the installation of a wave/current meter in the port of Civitavecchia, which continued in 2014.
In order to be able to outline future development scenarios for both sectors, aspects relating to devices that are currently prototypes were studied in depth: on the one hand, the behavior of wind turbines on floating platforms exposed to the stresses of the open sea; on the other hand, fluid dynamic studies have continued to optimize the configuration of a device for generating electricity from wave motion of the “oscillating water column” type, called WaveSax. Of particular importance were the tank tests carried out on two 1:20 scale WaveSax configurations, which both validated the results of the models and identified the most promising configuration, which was then used to create a 1:5 scale hydraulic prototype.
Again with a view to future developments, an in-depth technical-economic analysis of the potential for repowering wind farms on a national scale was carried out, focusing on three real-life case studies.
In addition, the new version of the Wind Atlas WebGIS was designed and built using modern open source tools, which will allow it to reach a wider audience and to interface with widely known and used web applications such as Google Earth.
In this project, special emphasis was placed on institutional support and participation in national regulatory bodies (CEI), European bodies (SETPlan – European Wind Initiative) and international bodies (IEA – WIND).