My Research

I am currently a Research Associate in Marine Renewables at The University of Edinburgh. I work in the Policy & Innovation Group within the Institute for Energy Systems, part of the School of Engineering, normally based at the King’s Buildings campus a few days a week. I work on a range of projects looking at tools and policies to foster nascent marine renewable energy technologies, primarily tidal stream and wave energy.

Right now, I am working on a couple of tasks in the SEETIP Ocean project. Firstly, contributing to identifying priority technology development areas and updating the Strategic Research & Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for ocean energy. I am also leading a task to map out infrastructure and industrial production requirements for 2030s deployments. This study focuses the physical infrastructure at ports and harbours to fabricate, assemble, install, operate, and maintain ocean energy arrays. 

Recently, I have been supporting my colleagues in the EVOLVE project to produce quantifiable outputs to illustrate the benefits associated with integrating ocean energy in low carbon energy systems. This work used a PyPSA (Python for Power System Analysis) hourly dispatch model to represent future energy scenarios in Great Britain.  The impact of ocean energy deployments was quantified in terms of marginal electricity prices, curtailed volumes, balancing costs, and system security indices. The first paper from this work was published recently (see below).

Prior to that, I spent 4 years researching how to test physical scale models of marine renewable energy devices[1]tidal turbines, wave energy convertors, floating wind turbines, and their supporting infrastructure, etc. in the new FloWave facility at the University of Edinburgh. This also involves understanding and measuring the characteristics of how the waves and current are produced in the test tank. You can read the summary of my thesis for more details. 

FloWave

Publications

All my academic publications are listed here, with key ones below. 

Policy and commercialisation

  • Shona Pennock, Donald R Noble, Yelena Vardanyan, Timur Delahaye, Henry Jeffrey (2023) A modelling framework to quantify the power system benefits from ocean energy deployments Applied Energy 10.1016/j.apenergy.2023.121413
  • Pablo Ruiz-Minguela, Donald R Noble, Vincenzo Nava, Shona Pennock,  Jesus M. Blanco, Henry Jeffrey (2023) Estimating Future Costs of Emerging Wave Energy Technologies Sustainability 10.3390/su15010215
  • Shona Pennock, Anna Garcia-Teruel, Donald R Noble, Owain Roberts, Adrian de Andres, Charlotte Cochrane, Henry Jeffrey (2022) Deriving current cost requirements from future targets: Case studies for emerging offshore renewable energy technologies Energies 10.3390/en15051732
  • Paul Kerr, Donald R Noble, Jonathan Hodges, Henry Jeffrey (2021) Implementing Radical Innovation in Renewable Energy Experience Curves Energies https://doi.org/10.3390/en14092364.

Testing/FloWave

  • Donald R Noble, et al. (2021) Standardising marine renewable energy testing: Gap analysis and recommendations for development of standards Journal of Marine Science and Engineering  10.3390/jmse9090971
  • Noble, D R; Draycott, S; Nambiar, A; Sellar, B G; Steynor, J; Kiprakis, A (2020) Experimental Assessment of Flow, Performance, and Loads for Tidal Turbines in a Closely-Spaced ArrayEnergies. 10.3390/en13081977
  • Draycott, S; Sellar, B; Davey, T; Noble, D R; Venugopal, V;  Ingram, D M (2019) Capture and simulation of the ocean environment for offshore renewable energyRenewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 10.1016/j.rser.2019.01.011.
  • Draycott, S, Noble, D R, Davey, T A D, Bruce, T, Ingram, D M, Johanning, L, Smith, H C M, Day, A H and Kaklis, P (2017) Re-creation of site-specific multi-directional waves with non-collinear crrent. Ocean Engineering10.1016/j.oceaneng.2017.10.047.
  • Noble, D R, Draycott, S, Davey, T A D, & Bruce, T (2017) Design diagrams for wavelength discrepancy in tank testing with inconsistently scaled intermediate water depth. International Journal of Marine Energy. 10.1016/j.ijome.2017.04.001.
  • Sutherland, D R J, Noble, D R, Steynor, J, Davey, T A D, & Bruce, T (2017) Characterisation of Current and Turbulence in the FloWave Ocean Energy Research Facility. Ocean Engineering. 10.1016/j.oceaneng.2017.02.028.
  • Noble D, Davey T, Smith H, Kaklis P, Robinson A, and Bruce T (2015) Spatial Variation of Currents Generated in the FloWave Ocean Energy Research FacilityProceedings of the 11th European Wave and Tidal Energy Conference (EWTEC2015), Nantes, France. (Research Gate)

Notes

Notes
1 tidal turbines, wave energy convertors, floating wind turbines, and their supporting infrastructure, etc.