WES: £2.25M for wave energy innovators

Wave Energy Scotland (WES) has allocated £2.25 million to 8 technology developers and consortia as part of its second competitive call for novel wave energy converters.

The projects will receive £300,000 each to take their technologies through WES’ stage one technology development process over the period of 12 months.

According to WES, the projects which have been successful in this call represent new technologies, or significant improvements on current concepts, which have a realistic prospect of delivering a commercially viable device.

The list of successful projects include 4C Engineering with its Sea Power Platform, Joules Energy Efficiency Services with WaveTrain device, Albatern with WaveNET array system, Mocean Energy with the Mocean WEC, Zyba Ltd with CCell oscillating wave surge converter, Quoceant with AISV project, Checkmate Seaenergy with Anaconda WEC, and AWS Ocean Energy with Waveswing WEC.

Fergus Ewing, Scottish Government Minister for Energy, said: “I am very pleased to see that Scottish firms and institutions lead five of the eight projects in the second call for novel wave energy converters. This once again affirms the home-grown expertise that we have right here on our own doorstep. These novel projects will bring us closer to developing a successful wave energy industry with Scotland firmly at the helm.”

Tim Hurst, Managing Director of WES, added: “WES has again received a wide international interest in the call for novel wave energy converters with 169 organisations involved in the applications. These new partnerships represent a superb opportunity to work with a wider spread of companies and academia to develop the winning wave energy converter design.”

WES was set up as a subsidiary of Highlands and Islands Enterprise and is fully funded by the Scottish Government. The organisation is seen as a fresh approach to tackling the issues which have proved challenging in the wave energy sector.

Image: EMEC/Pelamis’ WEC (now owned by HIE)/Illustration