A Review of Studies on the Nearshore Impact of Wave Energy Arrays: What have we learned and what is still needed? (Invited)

In the past five years a number of modelling studies on the nearshore impact of arrays of Wave Energy Converters (WEC) have appeared in the literature. These studies have focused on field sites where wave energy conversion is either actively being developed or on candidate sites for potential future development. Necessarily, the applications have primarily been to field sites in European waters. The suite of studies demonstrates a wide range of: numerical wave and current modelling approaches, WEC array parameterizations, and proxies for what constitutes nearshore impact. We will review these studies, summarize what has been learned and identify where common approaches have been agreed upon. We will also point out where things are poorly constrained, for example in how WECs influence the hydrodynamics and as to what constitutes nearshore impact. This leads us to identify some specific knowledge gaps that future work should address. Finally, we will present some new generalized modelling results that help bound the problem of estimating future nearshore impacts of WEC arrays.