Offshore Wind and Wave Energy and Climate Change Impacts

As a result of the increasing energy demand and the growing awareness of the repercussions of greenhouse gas emissions, the need for expanding renewable energy production has become clear in recent years. Therefore, renewable energy resources such as hydropower, geothermal, solar, wind, and wave energy have become even more popular. The global wave energy resource is vast and largely untapped. Offshore wind and wave energy have the potential to contribute significantly to the decarbonization of the energy mix. As a result, and in view of the continuous development of wave energy converters and technologies for wind harvesting in deep waters, these resources can constitute an essential source of renewable energy to be exploited in high-potential areas. Therefore, the assessment of wave and wind resources, as well as the development of the corresponding harvesting technologies, is a very important task, not only for their exploitation as a power resource, but also for its destructive effects in the coastal zones.

Following up-to-date developments on wind and wave hindcasts/forecasts and climate models, more accurate offshore wind and wave energy potential assessment, energy generation determination, and climate change impact identification are possible. On the other hand, significant research efforts are being done to improve the efficiency and the reliability of the harvesting technologies, which should be designed to work efficiently under typical environmental conditions as well as to withstand extreme conditions, that could be worse in the future due to the effects of climate change. The ultimate goal is to reduce the levelized cost of the energy produced.

Therefore, the main target of this Research Topic is to create a multidisciplinary forum of discussions on the most recent advances in offshore wind and wave energy, energy generation by wave energy converters (WECs), optimization of the WECs, geo-spatial multi criteria evaluation for installation of WECs in various marine environments as well as to identify possible climate change effects on offshore wind and wave energy.

We invite authors to contribute Original Research papers that will illustrate the continuing effort to understand marine energy environments and conditions and climate change impacts on them.

• Offshore wind energy,

• Ocean wave energy,

• Wave energy converters,

• Resource assessment,

• Energy generation,

• Offshore foundations,

• Mooring systems,

• Power take-off systems,

• Climate change impacts,

• Multi-criteria analysis,

• Hotspot identification,

• Offshore energy parks,

• Wind-wave hybrid systems,

• Near field and far field effects,

• Numerical modelling,

• Experimental modelling,

• Optimization of energy converters,

• Economics of wave energy,

• Economics of offshore wind.