Wave power technologies for the Mediterranean offshore: Scaling and performance analysis

The results show that large part of the Mediterranean coastline can be successfully exploited by properly downscaled versions of the WECs. More specifically, six of the studied wave power technologies can reach a capacity factor higher than 0.2 along 40% of the coastline and three WECs (AquaBuOY, Pelamis and Wavebob) can operate with a capacity factor exceeding 0.3 at 8% of the studied locations. The coastal regions with the highest WEC performance are of the Gulf of Lion, the Sicily channel, the Alboran Sea, the Libyan coast, Crete and Cyprus. The optimal size of the WECs at these locations is between 1/4 and 1/3 of the full WEC size and the resulting rated powers are between 10 and 30 kW. Noteworthy, a quite low performance is found for the most energetic areas of the Mediterranean (for example in western Sardinia), because a large part of the available energy is provided by extreme and rare events, for which the WEC efficiency is very low.