Abstract
The US Navy’s Wave Energy Test Site (WETS) is the first such grid-connected facility in the United States. It is located off Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Kaneohe on the windward (east) side of Oahu. The Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NAVFAC) has funded the infrastructure, including moorings, cables to shore, and onshore office space and grid interconnection hardware, as well as the environmental assessments required for site development. The site consists of 3 berths at 30, 60, and 80 m water depth. Each berth includes a three-point mooring system for the connection of wave energy conversion (WEC) devices, as well as an undersea cable and junction box for transmission of power and data to shore. The prepermitted site is capable of hosting WEC devices up to 1-MW. Through a cooperative effort between NAVFAC and the Department of Energy (DOE), the site is hosting companies for the testing of their pre-commercial devices in an operational setting in order to advance their technology readiness level. The Hawaii Natural Energy Institute (HNEI), at the University of Hawaii (UH), is supporting DOE and Navy objectives at WETS in a variety of ways. In this paper, we present one such category of support – numerical wave forecasting and hindcasting.