Reference Model #1 – Tidal Energy: Resource

Introduction Reference Model #1 is a tidal turbine operating in a narrow, tidal channel. The site is a generalized version of Tacoma Narrows, Puget Sound, Washington. The resource is a mixed, mainly semidiurnal tidal regime with two ebbs and floods each day of unequal strength (i.e., a diurnal inequality in which a strong ebb/flood exchange is followed by a weak exchange). The diurnal inequalities provide extended windows of weak currents for device installation and maintenance activities relative to a purely semidiurnal tidal regime, though at the expense of reduced generation potential for equivalent peak currents. Doppler profiler data from Puget Sound are used to construct a reference tidal resource (i.e., a generic mixed, mainly semidiurnal tidal regime). After Polagye and Thomson (submitted), currents measured by a Doppler profiler (Usample) may be conceptually partitioned into deterministic (Udet), meteorological (Umet), and turbulent (Uturb) components, as well as Doppler uncertainty (nsample) (Brumley et al. 1991).