Development of green ports with the consideration of coastal wave energy

Abstract

Considering the rapid development of maritime logistics, the reduction of energy consumption at ports is important in the sustainable development of global economics. Oceans have been known as sources of clean energy, and wave energy is attracting more and more attention from both scholars and practitioners. Even though much effort has been made to develop advanced technologies of wave energy, it is still not clear how ports and electricity plants will evaluate its performance and make decisions on the investment. This paper analyzed the decision framework of ports and electricity plants that can decide how much to invest into wave energy converters, by considering the uncertainty of wave energy supply. A mathematical model is developed to obtain the optimal decisions of a single port and electricity plant for different cases. We show that in most cases, the port has a no lower motivation for investing in the wave energy than the electricity plant. Our theoretical analyses also shed light on the impacts of the parameters on the optimal decisions. Considering the difficulty in estimating the uncertainty of wave energy supply, we extend the distribution-free model to our problem which can make our model more practical.