Development of a tool for the energy feasibility analysis of a floating city

Seventy-one percent of our planet is covered by sea: it is better to call it an ocean planet than planet earth. The challenge of our time is undoubtedly to curb climate change: it is well known that global warming and rising sea levels are among the most discussed environmental issues. It is estimated that by 2050, 90 percent of the world's largest cities will be exposed to sea level rise (UN-Habitat). The leading causes lie in the concomitant of various environmental phenomena: such as global warming of the atmosphere, melting of glaciers at the poles, coastal erosion, and increasingly frequent flooding. The sea, like plants, produces 50 percent of the oxygen and captures 25 percent of the carbon dioxide: thus, it alone lends us a big hand in coping with climate change. The sea has constantly recreated a vital role in our lives, but why not try to give it an even more important one, namely housing us? Why not shift our daily lives to the water as we live on land? Life on water could be the answer to land scarcity and the impact of climate change. So, the constraint is that the new "floating cities" be designed to be autonomous, carbon-neutral, and support marine environments. On the other hand, from the energy point of view, the offshore sector is increasingly promising: consider all the new projects and research funding for the construction of offshore wind farms, floating solar, tidal energy, and wave energy converters. Floating cities growing in the sea would thus have a close relationship with these types of renewable energy. The share of electricity generated from renewable energy sources (RES) is rising, and energy communities (ECs) are one of the options to increase self-consumption in aggregate systems. The type of electricity grid of ECs must be designed to manage the variability of RES and zero inertia of technologies. This work aims to propose a methodology and develop a tool based on MatLab software that can furnish the energy pre-feasibility analysis of a possible floating community as autonomous from land.