Wave energy company Mocean Energy has raised £3.2 million in EU funding to develop and deploy a 250kW wave machine in Orkney.
The machine will be built in Scotland and its installation will start in 2025. The machine, called Blue Horizon 250, is to be built in Scotland and deployed in a grid-connected berth at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney by 2025.
The Edinburgh-based company aims to create 1-2MW of wave power by 2030. The £3.2 million (€3,749,405) grant was secured in Phase 3 of EuropeWave, a pre-commercial procurement programme, funded through the EU and managed in collaboration with Wave Energy Scotland, the Basque Energy Agency and Ocean Energy Europe.
Mocean Energy was one of three wave companies awarded funds in Phase 3, along with IDOM Consulting and CETO Wave Energy Ireland, who will install their devices at the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP) in northern Spain.
“This is a major milestone for Mocean Energy,” states Mocean co-founder and Managing Director Cameron McNatt. “We have already demonstrated our technology successfully at small scale and this programme will allow us to build a significantly larger machine based on our proven hinged raft design, and incorporate our novel direct drive generator.”
“Innovation funding is crucial for early-stage technologies, and I am grateful to EuropeWave for this support which will help leverage the additional private investment this project will require. Looking further ahead, our goal is to deliver a small array in UK waters this decade, and I am confident that with appropriate innovation funding in place we can realise our ambition to build commercial wave energy arrays and generate home-grown green energy from our seas, both in the UK and around the world,” McNatt says.
Congrats to @moceanenergy who have secured @EuropeWave_EU funding to develop and deploy a 250kW wave machine at EMEC’s Billia Croo wave test site 👏
— EMEC (@EMEC_Ltd) September 5, 2023
To read more: https://t.co/VBaAP9dN8o pic.twitter.com/HxZIFnAls8
Mocean Energy has been taking part in the £2 million Renewables for Subsea Power (RSP) programme which has connected Mocean’s 10kW Blue X wave energy prototype with a Halo underwater battery system developed by Aberdeen intelligent energy management specialists Verlume.
These technologies are already operational off Orkney, providing power to subsea control equipment and an underwater autonomous vehicle, in partnership with the Net Zero Technology Centre. Mocean says that Blue Horizon 250 will be “a significant scale up from Blue X and is designed for commercial applications on islands and remote communities, while also including early grid projects and off-grid applications, such as oil and gas and aquaculture.”
Mocean is working with local suppliers like Aberdeen-based TEXO Engineering and Fabrication to deliver around 80% of its supply chain locally.
In 2022, Current± reported that Mocean Energy had raised £730,000 in equity funding to accelerate the commercial roll-out of its technology. In August 2023, Mocean completed an initial four-month test to prove that its subsea battery storage system can power subsea equipment via wave power.
