The Portuguese coast, in addition to the high wind and wave renewable energy resources, also offers a set of favorable geophysical and infrastructural characteristics for the use of these marine renewable energies, namely a strong concentration of population and the existing electric grid near the coast. These characteristics enabled the creation of specific regions for testing and demonstrating the feasibility of technologies to harness marine energy, such as S. Pedro de Moel’s a pilot zone created in 2008 and two new test zones, one offshore Peniche and another located near the coast of Viana do Castelo.
The OffshorePlan project arose from the will to experimentally confirm the existence of an economically sustainable marine energy resource given by historically available indicators. This project enabled to refine and validate the atlases obtained for the marine resources and supports, in the near future, well informed low-risk decisions for both the wind and wave energy investors and Portuguese public administration.
To achieve these goals, the existing information on the Portuguese coast renewable resources needed systematization; increased accuracy of the spatial characterization; atlases validation and a cost-benefit analysis of the investments in marine power plants as a function of their capacity and location.
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Project website here.
