Wave power investment
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AWS Ocean Energy has secured a £2m investment from Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Co-investment Fund and the Shell Technology Ventures Fund 1 (STVF1), an affiliate of Royal Dutch Shell.
The new investment enables AWS Ocean to take forward its plans to develop and deploy its AWS-III wave power technology while simultaneously helping the company in its work to design associated technologies, such as mooring systems, for wider use in the wave and tidal energy sectors.
The new investment follows a review of the company’s technology that has resulted in improvements to the system.
The design is said to build on extensive research including offshore testing and detailed modelling of the AWS technology. The improved system will have a generating capacity of between 2.4MW and 4MW.
‘Making sure our customers can make adequate returns from AWS wave power on current tariffs is essential,’ said AWS Ocean’s Simon Grey. ‘Also essential is the ability to achieve rapid roll-out and the large scale of AWS-III contributes to both of these.
‘Delivering the complete solution will take time. We are already in discussions with partners to ensure that AWS-III is available as a demonstrated commercial product by 2014.
‘Industrial multinationals will be prepared to fund “big ticket” demonstration projects providing that the technology is proven first and so our focus is to do just that: delivering proven technology that actually works.’
AWS Ocean Energy is undertaking component and sub-system testing and qualification and is aiming to deploy a full-system prototype AWS-III during 2011.
The company expects this will lead to deployment of a pre-commercial demonstrator plant during 2013.
