OPT to lease PowerBuoy to Mitsui

Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) has entered into a letter of intent with Mitsui Engineering and Shipbuilding (MES) to provide engineering support and potentially lease its APB350 PowerBuoy for the project off Japan.

OPT is to conduct funded pre-work tasks and negotiate a definitive agreement that would allow for the lease of the APB350 PowerBuoy for a project off the coast of Kozu island, the US-based wave energy developer informed.

The OPT project scope would also include associated deployment planning and logistics, ocean performance data collection and processing.

Initial engineering tasks are planned to commence this month with PowerBuoy shipment and deployment to Japan expected in 2017.

In addition, OPT and MES plan to jointly develop and test an advanced control algorithm with the goal of assessing increasing ocean wave capture and electric power generation.

George Kirby, President and CEO of OPT, said: “We are excited to support MES’s ocean project with our advanced APB350 PowerBuoy by providing a power and communications platform specific to Japanese conditions and applications.”

Toshihiko Maemura, Manager at Renewable Energy Project Group of MES, said: “We would like to assure that this project will prove a high ability of our advanced control algorithm for state of calm sea off Kozu-island. We are looking forward to uniting our efforts with Ocean Power Technologies in order to develop a wave power generation system which is suited for Japanese sea conditions and others.”