A Glasgow-based renewable energy quango is part of a European consortium which has launched a new €1.8 million project to driving down the cost of marine energy components
The three-year Oceanera-Net project – led by Spain’s Tecnalia – includes the UK Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult (OREC).
The project aims to establish the requirements for monitoring, control and connection components for wave and tidal energy arrays, ensuring that the next generation of these devices is optimised to improve reliability and cost effectiveness.
The project will take forward the development of four critical components for ocean energy:
- A safety monitoring and control device
- A wave measurement buoy
- An umbilical cable monitoring device
- An underwater device-to-cable connector for a floating energy converter.
An OREC spokesman said: “Ocean energy technologies are moving steadily from laboratory scale models to real scale prototypes and arrays of converters.
“Delivering reliable and cost-effective technologies will be paramount to the ultimate commercial success of Europe’s ocean energy industry and therefore identifying common components will help reduce costs by driving down both capital and operational expenditure, ramping up volume manufacturing.”
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