WAVES Offshore Wind Techno-economic Analysis#

Wind Asset Value Estimation System (WAVES) is a tool for estimating the lifecycle costs of offshore wind projects using NREL's flagship techno economic models. WAVES is in active development due to wrapping other in-development software packages for its underlying operations: ORBIT for CapEx, WOMBAT for OpEx, and FLORIS for AEP.

Quick Start Guide#

WAVES is a Python package, run via scripts or Jupyter notebooks, but is a low- to no-code software that relies on configurations and post-processing method calls for results. At its core, WAVES does the work of combining each software's configurations and results, so that users don't have to put in the painstaking work, and can focus on what scenarios should be run--not how to run them.

At its core, WAVES is a wrapper around ORBIT, WOMBAT, and FLORIS, so users are expected to know how to work with each of these models to work with WAVES.

Model

Purpose

GitHub

Documentation

ORBIT

CapEx

WISDEM/ORBIT

https://wisdem.github.io/ORBIT/

WOMBAT

OpEx, Availability

WISDEM/WOMBAT

https://wisdem.github.io/WOMBAT/

FLORIS

Energy Production

NREL/FLORIS

https://nrel.github.io/FLORIS/

Installation#

Requires Python 3.9 or 3.10.

For basic usage, users can install WAVES directly from PyPI, or from source for more advanced usage.

Pip#

pip install waves

From Source#

git clone https://github.com/NREL/WAVES.git
cd WAVES
pip install .
Tinkering#

Use the -e for an editable installation, in case you plan on editing any underlying code.

pip install -e .
Developing#

If you plan on contributing to the code base at any point, be sure to install the developer tools.

pip install -e ".[dev,docs]"
pre-commit install

Engaging on GitHub#

WAVES utilizes the following for coordinating development efforts

  • Issues: report bugs and submit feature requests

  • Pull Requests: submit bug fixes, feature request, documentation improvements, and any other improvements

Documentation Table of Contents#