Mooring System Analysis and Fragility Curve Estimation: The Economic Impact of Low Probability High Impact Events on Ocean Current Devices

With the world’s rising concern about climate change and sustainability, renewable energy technologies evolved substantially over the past few years as result of increasing political and financial support. As an example, the United States government has recently announced a 30 GW target for offshore wind energy deployment by 2030 and 110 GW by 2050. More locally, North Carolina has defined as its objective 70% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030 and to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. These ambitious targets were concomitantly followed by plans to deploy 8GW of offshore wind energy by 2040 in the state. As the size of offshore renewable energy deployments arrays increase, a proper understanding of the risks associated with each offshore technology becomes of utmost importance including the continuing economic interest in the marine renewable energy sector. In the work proposed herein, we aim to improve the modeling/analysis of the mooring systems for ocean current devices and propose a fragility curve design capable of representing the most critical conditions for this technology. During the previous year of work, we have learned that variability in the Gulfstream current velocity poses risk to the mooring system. In addition, a goal of this project is to integrate the fragility analyses into a capacity expansion model of the NC energy system to make an economic assessment of the impact of these mooring fragility during operating conditions. In pursuing the aforementioned goals, our team will build upon models and simulations designed/performed in previous years, improving the accuracy in the representation of the ocean current mooring system and the Bayesian statistical model explored during the FY 2021-2022 for the analysis of extreme ocean current conditions.

de Queiroz, A.R. (co-PI), Gabr, M. (co-PI) Mooring System Analysis and Fragility Curve Estimation: The Economic Impact of Low Probability High Impact Events on Ocean Current Devices, Funded by the UNC Coastal Studies Institute, Renewable Ocean Energy for North Carolina Program, 2022-2023

Analysis Framework - Mooring System Analysis and Fragility Curve Estimation: The Economic Impact of Low Probability High Impact Events on Ocean Current Devices