Techno–Economic Viability of Ocean Wave Power Generation in the Bight of Benin, Southwest Nigerian Coast

Abstract

With about 40% of Nigeria’s population representing over 92million and about 45% of Sub-Saharan Africa representing over 600million lacking access to electricity or clean energy, being the energy poverty capital of the world, developing autonomous renewable energy sources based on isolated or interconnected mini-grid systems is exigent. Ocean renewable energies like wave energy present a great option given the fact that coastal and cities tend to have higher populations, while islets, remote settlements, and swampy areas in Nigeria’s littoral zones tend to be primarily underserved due to technical difficulty, logistic challenges, and cost of grid extension, among other things. The wave energy electric power generation potential for Southwest Nigeria was assessed by obtaining and averaging the significant wave heights (SWH), periods, and ancillary datasets at various times of the day and for three geolocations evenly spread from west to east across the region’s coastline in the Bight of Benin. The data for wave energy variables were evaluated using various models and methods, including Techno-Economic Renewable Viability Index (TEREVI), conventional Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE), Techno-Economic Levelized Cost of Energy (TELCOE), and HOMER simulation to measure the techno-economic viability and general competitiveness among other proven and probable renewable energy resources in Southwest Nigeria based on a 100kW pilot wave power plant. From the results, HOMER optimization energy cost is $0.094003211/kWh, the Matlab energy generation cost simulation is $0.09t11/kWh, the LCOE value is $0.082307404/kWh, and the TELCOE value is $0.092809/kWh. Wave power potential in the Bight of Benin shows a conservative value of low to marginal commercial viability based on existing conversion technologies owing to low learning rate, thus presenting a medium to long-term electrification promise as a fair future sustainable energy strategy especially given Nigeria’s drive towards blue economy, energy transition, and the trend towards low wave height conversion technologies that is likely going to increase with the advance in research and the development of high-efficiency wave turbines and site preparation techniques serving not just power generation but also integral to windbreaks for ports and harbours.