WAVE ENERGY: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded NREL and SANDIA to work on a three-year collaborative project to develop a simulation tool

A number of initiatives aimed at speeding up the development of the wave energy sector have been launched in the U.S. and Europe. As part of the ongoing work to establish a viable United States wave energy industry, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SANDIA) are working on the creation of a sophisticated open-source modeling tool known as WEC-Sim — and the U.S. Department of Energy is also enlisting the coding community to help in its development. Meanwhile, the European WavePOD project is an industry-wide initiative that aims to solve the problem of converting captured wave energy into electricity by creating a "standardised self-contained offshore electricity generator for the wave industry." WEC-Sim Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded NREL and SANDIA to work on a three-year collaborative project to develop a simulation tool for the wave energy sector. A little over a year into the project, the team has already released the first version of the Wave Energy Converter Simulator (WEC-Sim), a customisable open-source numerical modeling tool designed to help the wave energy community to analyse and optimise wave-energy converters (WECs) and meet device-specific modeling needs. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/11/marine-energy-making-waves-on-both-sides-of-the-pond