€4.5m wave energy test platform to enhance Ireland’s leading status

IRELAND’S reputation as a leader in wave energy technology is being enhanced by a €4.5 million research investment on a test platform being set up in Galway Bay this weekend.

The 30-tonne platform of Cobh-based Ocean Energy Ltd is hosting test components developed by Irish and European researchers through a project funded by EU Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn. It was craned into the water on Galway’s docks yesterday and is being towed this morning to the Marine Institute Galway Bay test site a kilometre south of Spiddal, where trials will take place over the next three months.

The project is being co-ordinated by University College Cork’s Hydraulics and Maritime Research Centre (HMRC), which has overseen the installation of its own technologies and others by partner research groups from universities and industry here and from Portugal, UK, Spain, Germany, Denmark and Italy.

They will be able to remotely monitor and control the test components such as turbines, communications and other aspects, with a view to improving the harnessing of wave power. The platform is a scaled-down version of a fully operating wave energy unit, which Ocean Energy director of operations Mike Whelan hopes could be commercially viable within a few years.

“The full-sized platform we hope to develop will be able to produce enough power for around 900 average homes,” he said.

The test platform has already spent almost three years in the test site since Christmas 2006 but the new technologies have been integrated onto it onshore in Galway docks since the start of this year. HMRC research manager Dr Ray Alcorn said the aim is to improve the efficiency and lower the costs of harvesting wave energy from such units, with Ireland already a world leaders in this area.

A Sustainable Energy Authority report last year suggested ocean energy could create up to 70,000 jobs and generate economic benefits of as much as €12bn by 2030.