Mooring solutions for large wave energy converters

The Danish wave energy sector consists of several large floating wave energy converters (WECs) which will need to have specifically designed mooring systems. For these it is of importance to reduce the resulting mooring and structural loads rather than avoiding motions, which can be done by increasing the mooring compliance. This will reduce the cost of the mooring solution and structure of the WECs, and thereby the overall cost of the WECs and their produced energy, while making the systems more reliable.

The four partner WECs are Floating Power Plant, Wave Dragon, Weptos and Leancon who are all at the offshore prototype development stage. They all require similar mooring solutions, as they are large floating structures operating at intermediate water depths (30 – 100m) at commercial scale deployments. The project aims at investigating and comparing different mooring solutions useable for these large WECs. The mooring solutions will be assessed step-wise in order to have a very systematic and rigorous evaluation.

The results will provide the partners with experience and detailed analysis of the development of mooring solutions which will make them useable in practice. Lastly, the project will build national competences in design and modelling of mooring systems for WECs.