Implementation of Tidal Energy Extraction in FVCOM

This internship will be hosted by the Oceanography group at Marine Scotland Science (MSS). Marine Scotland is a directorate of the Scottish Government and is the lead marine management organisation in Scotland. It is responsible for the licensing, regulation and spatial planning of marine renewable energy developments within Scotland. The Oceanography group advices the Marine Scotland licensing and operations team on the potential consequences of tidal energy development in Scottish waters, and uses a number of resources including hydrodynamic models.

Scotland has substantial wave and tidal energy resources and is at the forefront of the development of marine renewable technologies and ocean energy exploitation. The next phase will see these wave and tidal devices deployed in arrays, with many sites being developed. Although developers have entered into agreements with The Crown Estate for seabed leases, all projects remain subject to licensing requirements under the Marine Scotland Act (2010).

As part of the licensing arrangements, environmental effects in the immediate vicinity of devices and arrays will be addressed in the EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) process that each developer must undertake. It is essential, however, that the regulatory authorities, Marine Scotland, understand how a number of multi-site developments collectively impact on the physical processes over a wider region, both in relation to cumulative effects of the developments and marine planning responsibilities. At a regional scale, careful selection of sites may enable the optimum exploitation of the resource while minimising any environmental impacts to an acceptable level.

In order to achieve a clearer understanding of the impact on the physical processes due to tidal energy extraction accurate models need to be developed that truly simulate the methodology of extraction. It is this complex process where the greatest uncertainty in modelling clearly lies and this internship deals directly with the methodology of energy extraction and its incorporation into FVCOM.

- The Finite Volume Coastal Ocean Model (FVCOM) is a 3D unstructured-grid, finite-volume, free-surface coastal circulation model developed at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, USA. FVCOM is an open-source model and has a growing, predominantly academic, user base in Scotland and the UK (see Case for Support for further details).

- MSS has adopted FVCOM as their preferred model for modelling the coastal and shelf seas of Scotland. Scotland's wave and tidal energy industry is leading the world, and the Scottish Government is actively encouraging investment and pursuing research to better understand the consequences of wave and tidal energy development. There is therefore a need for MSS to develop coastal hydrodynamics models that can simulate the extraction of wave and tidal energy, in order to understand the physical consequences.

- TeraWatt (EPSRC 2012-2015) will have produced position papers on energy extraction methodologies by Jan 2014, which will be made available to the Internship. A methodology should be developed as part of other, contracted out, MSS work and it is hoped that this might also be available for the project.

- Other models (Mike, Delft3D) have implemented energy extraction, albeit in a crude manner, and similar approaches could be used. It is also hoped that other, more novel, approaches will be researched and adopted as part of the internship.

- The ultimate aim of the internship is to develop and implement method(s) for simulating the extraction of tidal stream energy in FVCOM.