COASTAL PROTECTIONS PROVIDED BY ENERGY FARMS IN THE ROMANIAN NEARSHORE

Abstract

The objective of the present work is to give an overview of the coastal protection provided by energy farms that would operate in the Romanian coastal environment of the Black Sea. Based on some previous results, it was possible to identify the wind and wave conditions in the Black Sea area, according to datasets coming from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction and also by analyzing the satellite measurements provided by the AVISO project. It was first noticed that the western part of the Black Sea seems to present more significant energetic conditions. Usually, the erosion of the coastlines is associated with a higher wave energy level so, as a next step, there were investigated several studie,s which include either wave energy or hybrid wind-wave energy farms for the coastal protection. These are based on the so called “what-if” scenarios and involve an operational WEC (Wave Energy Converter) system, namely the Wave Dragon, and also a wave generator called NEMOS, which is designed to be coupled to an offshore wind farm, while in the last case, it was considered a generic farm defined by various transmission coefficients. Based on these results, it can be concluded that the present work can lead to a better understanding of the variations induced by an energy farm over the wave climate reported in the Romanian nearshore, in this way being possible to choose the optimum solutions for coastal protection applications in terms of the WEC system and the distance of the farm from the coastline