Challenge Overview
1.0 Project Overview
Recent studies have shown that the maximum technically recoverable energy from U.S. waves and tidal currents in approximately 1,420 terawatt-hours per year (TWh/yr). From this total, Wave Energy Conversion (WEC) devices could extract an estimated 1,170 TWh/yr along the coast of the United States. Because 1 TwH is equivalent to the energy consumed by 100,000 American homes in one year (source
), this means that WEC devices could technically power 100 million American homes each year.
With nearly 40% of the nation's population (about 125 million Americans) living in counties directly on the United States' shoreline (source), this renewable energy source is worth the investment. And because an increasing portion of Americans are moving to the coast each year, accelerating the development of WEC devices could lead to a huge return on investment by providing clean, renewable power to significant portion of the U.S. population.
But there's one big problem - testing new WEC devices is currently prohibitively expensive. Developers of these devices require a software model that can simulate the movement of waves and determine the amount of power that their WEC device would output in a wave environment. This type of modeling software currently costs about $40,000 a year to use. While large corporations may be able to afford this high price tag, start-ups hoping to enter the wave energy industry cannot.
The goal of this project is to produce a customizable open-source modeling software that can be used by anyone developing WEC devices in the United States. This will lead to faster innovation so that wave energy start-ups all over the country can develop, analyze, and optimize their devices more quickly than ever before.
Final Submission Guidelines
http://apps.topcoder.com/wiki/display/~hello-c/DOE+Milestone+1+Bug+Hunt