This image shows the waters off the coast of Orkney, an archipelago north of mainland Scotland that is home to the European Maritime Energy Centre.
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The €19.6 million (about $19.3 million) initiative around the commercialization of large-scale wave energy projects will be officially launched late Wednesday, in a move Thailand marks another step forward for the emerging field.
The collaboration, called WEDUSEA, involves 14 partners from academia and industry, with funding coming from Innovate UK and the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme.
The launch will take place at the International Conference on Ocean Energy, being held in the coastal city of San Sebastian, in Spain.
WEDUSEA is being coordinated by OceanEnergy, an Irish company that has developed the OE35, a kit that has been dubbed “the world’s largest capacity floating wave energy device.” Power is the amount of electricity a generator can generate at full capacity.
WEDUSEA will last four years, with the first phase focusing on designing a 1-megawatt version of the OE35, according to a statement released by the European Maritime Energy Center earlier this week.
“Followed by a two-year grid connection demonstration at the wave energy test site … Billia Croo of the European Marine Energy Center in Orkney, Scotland,” the statement added.
Orkney is an archipelago located in the waters north of mainland Scotland. EMEC, based there, has been a major hub for tidal and wave energy development since its founding in 2003.
In a separate statement, OceanEnergy said the third phase of the project will look at commercialization, among other things. The overarching goal of the project is to “create a technology implementation roadmap for a 20 MW test farm”, according to EMEC.
Myles Heward, project manager at EMEC, said: “The innovative actions taken under this program aim to improve the efficiency, reliability, scalability and sustainability of wave energy technology. and reduce the LCOE of this technology by more than 30%. “This will help reduce the risk of investing in wave energy.”
LCOE refers to the equalized cost of energy, a term The US database that Tethys defines as “a measure of the cost of a device’s life divided by energy production.”
Tony Lewis, Technical Director of OceanEnergy, is optimistic about WEDUSEA’s prospects.
He said the project will “demonstrate that wave technology is on a cost-reducing trajectory and will therefore be a stepping stone to larger commercial scale-up and further industrialisation.”
“We predict that one day the natural energy of the world’s oceans will power the majority of the grid,” Lewis added.
Despite excitement about marine energy potential, the footprint of tidal and wave current projects is still very small compared to other renewables.
In data published in March 2022, Ocean Energy Europe says 2.2 MW of tidal stream capacity was installed in Europe last year, compared with just 260 kilowatts in 2020.
For wave power, 681 kW was installed, which OEE says is a threefold increase. Globally, 1.38 MW of wave power has been commissioned by 2021, while 3.12 MW of tidal stream capacity has been installed.
By comparison, Europe has installed 17.4 gigawatts of wind capacity by 2021, according to figures from industry body WindEurope.
