IHES wave power prototype basks under French sun

 
GEPS Techno’s hybrid WAVEGEM platform, combining solar and wave energy, has been inaugurated at Chantiers de l’Atlantique shipyard in Saint-Nazaire, ahead of next year’s sea trials at SEM-REV site in France.

After 18 months of studies and five more of implementation under the Integrated Harvesting Energy System (IHES) project, WAVEGEM was officially inaugurated on Monday, December 18, 2018.

Featuring six turbines, and 68 m2 of solar panels, which jointly bring the prototype’s capacity to 150kW, the IHES demonstrator will be installed in 2019 at the SEM-REV open ocean test site off western France, operated by Centrale Nantes and co-financed by Pays de la Loire region.

It will be secured on site with a four-point synthetic line mooring system, Centrale Nantes informed.

The IHES prototype, whose development was supported by the EU’s FORESEA program, will at SEM-REV join the first offshore wind turbine installed in France – the Floatgen – for an 18-month trial period as the last step before the hybrid clean energy technology is placed on the market, according to the developers.

Born from the collaborative work, led by GEPS TECHNO, the project brings together several companies including Chantiers de l’Atlantique, Blue Solutions, SNEF, as well as academic partners Centrale Nantes, Ifremer and ICAM, with the support from the Pays de la Loire region and BPI.

This type of platform is intended for oil and gas, marine renewable energy, mining and aquaculture sectors, GEPS Techno said earlier.

The aim of upcoming trials at SEM-REV is to validate the performance of the technology as it represents one of the technological bricks in GEPS Techno’s M-Liner project which combines several sources of renewable energy including solar, wind, wave and tidal in a single platform that can provide electricity to islands, isolated areas and sites at sea.