Australian clean energy developer Carnegie Clean Energy has released an update on the latest design developments to its commercial prototype, the CETO 6 unit, which is now rated at 1.5MW.
The new CETO 6 unit will have a nominal capacity of 1.5MW – up from 1MW for the previous design, Carnegie informed.
This capacity will vary in accordance with the specific site conditions for each project and the specific design tailored for a project site, the company noted.
The increase in energy production over the previous single moored CETO 6 unit design results in a more cost competitive unit able to compete with other mainstream renewable technologies, once it is manufactured in high volumes and incorporated in large projects, according to Carnegie.
Also, CETO 6 units will have multiple moorings which also require multiple foundations for each unit, which could potentially increase the cost of foundations per unit.
However, Carnegie said that each of the mooring lines and associated foundations in the new CETO 6 design are carrying less load and can therefore be smaller than the foundation for a single moored device.
Additionally, Carnegie has developed a networked arrangement for foundations for large scale wave farms that allows foundation sharing, which has been the subject of a research project between Carnegie and the University of Western Australia.
The combination of decreased foundation size and the benefits of foundation sharing result in a significant reduction in foundation cost per CETO 6 unit, Carnegie said.
Jonathan Fievez , Carnegie’s Chief Technology Officer, said: “More than ever at Carnegie, we’re aware of the increasing competitiveness of wind, solar and battery technologies. We challenged the CETO team to disrupt our own thinking and used collaborations with industry as well as taking our own internal analysis capabilities to go to the next level. We are very confident in the performance trajectory that we are taking with the updated CETO 6 design.”
Furthermore, Carnegie conducted research and analysis on the Buoyant Actuator (BA), undertaking more than 20 billion simulations over the past 12 months to optimize the CETO 6 unit hydrodynamics.
The CETO 6 design builds on intellectual property first lodged by Carnegie in 2013 incorporating on‐ board power generation and multiple moorings and power take off (PTO) modules.
The associated US patent, granted on November 6, 2017, confirms the additional features as state of the art, Carnegie said.
The Australian wave energy developer said the new CETO 6 design will be first deployed at its Albany Wave Energy Project , off Western Australia, during the 2019/2020 summer weather window.