Unlocking Energy Potential in Aquatic Energy Systems: Techno-Economic Insights

Abstract

Power and energy systems are undergoing a rapid transition toward high penetrations of clean and hybrid energy resources, particularly in water-rich and offshore environments. Compared to conventional generation-dominated systems, emerging power systems increasingly rely on complex interactions among hydropower, solar photovoltaics, offshore wind, energy storage, and transmission assets. While these hybrid configurations offer significant potential to improve system reliability, asset utilization, and energy security, they also introduce new technical, economic, and operational challenges associated with resource variability, infrastructure constraints, and system-level uncertainty. This talk will highlight recent research at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) on techno-economic and operational feasibility analysis of emerging renewable hybrid systems. First, we will present a comprehensive feasibility assessment of floating photovoltaic (FPV)–hydropower hybrid systems using INL’s AquaPV tool, demonstrating how long-term techno-economic analysis and dispatch-aware modeling can quantify system value, uncertainty, and deployment tradeoffs. We will then discuss offshore wind integration challenges, with a focus on dynamic line rating (DLR) feasibility analysis for submarine transmission cables, illustrating how environmental conditions can be leveraged to unlock latent transmission capacity while maintaining thermal and reliability constraints. The talk will conclude by discussing broader implications for marine energy deployment, emphasizing how integrated techno-economic modeling, reliability-aware planning, and environmental co-optimization can reduce investment risk, improve system resilience, and accelerate commercialization of wave, offshore wind, and other marine energy technologies. Together, these approaches provide a scalable framework for enabling reliable, economically viable, and grid-ready marine energy systems.

Biography

Dr. Mucun Sun is a Power System Research Engineer in the Energy Systems group at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). His research focuses on power system optimization, reliability analysis, and techno-economic analysis. He currently serves as Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on more than 10 projects totaling over $7 million, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Water Power, Vehicle Technologies Offices, Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, the Ocean Energy Safety Institute (OESI), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and INL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. Dr. Sun received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas, where his research emphasized renewable energy forecasting and power system optimization. Prior to joining INL, he was a Senior Data Scientist at GE Renewable Energy, leading the development of diagnostic and prognostic tools for critical wind turbine components. He has contributed to multiple open-source tools for wind forecasting and turbine condition monitoring and currently serves as a Young Editorial Board Member for Applied Energy and Advances in Applied Energy.