Wave energy park in the North Sea put up for sale

A 10MW wave energy park, located five kilometers offshore the western Swedish coastline, has been put up for sale to the highest bidder, along with associated infrastructure and licenses.

The Sotenäs Wave Energy Park, a 0.8 km2 offshore test area in the Skagerrak strait near Smögen, is said to be one of only a few facilities in the world offering suitable environment for wave energy demonstration and pre-commercial projects, as it already has all the permits and infrastructure in place.

Owned by the Swedish floating wind developer Flowocean since September 2020, the site is now put up for sale as the owner changed its plans to explore the test area for floating wind power generation since it had found a more suitable site for such endeavor.

Some of the main components of the Sotenäs Wave Energy Park, that will be sold in the entirety as one package, include 37 wave energy converters installed on the seafloor together with their connection cables, which are no longer functional.

With a maximum grid capacity of 10MW, the site is also equipped with a subsea switchgear, installed on the seafloor together with its connection cable, a 9.6 km long 52kV subsea cable leading to shore point in Kungshamn, for which Fortum holds the concession.

From the shore point, a 400 m long 52 kV land cable leads up to the land substation.

The assets for sale include the land substation as well, with an insertion resistor integrated with the grid connection point in the main substation in Kungshamn.

In addition, the site comes with more than 20 different permits, licenses and approvals, as it was operational for Seabased Industry previously, along with final project documentation, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), contingency plan, and marine biological control programs, to name a few.

As Offshore Energy understands, the wave energy park will be sold in full to the highest bidder with non-binding offers deadline set for April 30, 2022.

As mentioned above, the Sotenäs Wave Energy Park was previously owned by Swedish wave developer Seabased, who together with Fortum, connected the low voltage marine substation to the Nordic grid back in 2015, in what was heralded as the first ever grid connected subsea generator switchgear.

Shortly thereafter, the first four buoys were connected to their respective wave energy converters and in January 2016, the wave power park generated power for the Nordic power grid for the first time.

After initial plans to expand the site further, Seabased decided late in 2017 to instead use it as an R&D area for environmental and open-sea testing and demonstration of its own technology.

However, in the beginning of 2019 Seabased decided to liquidate one of its wholly-owned subsidiary Seabased Industries, which was in charge of the Sotenäs Wave Energy Park, due to ‘compound effect of multiple factors that impact the company’s ability to carry out its core commercial business in Lysekil’.

This effectively meant Seabased will no longer be pursuing further development of the test site, and the talks with organizations that expressed interest in taking over the Sotenäs Wave Energy Park started shortly after.

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