Southwest rides wave of marine energy projects

The southwest has boosted its reputation as a centre for marine energy with the announcement on Wednesday of a €24.5m wave power research project supported by the European Commission.

The project at the Wave Hub research station, 10 miles off the north Cornwall coast, will be led by Fortum, a Finnish utility company, deploying a range of test devices in ocean conditions.

Wave Hub is a government-backed facility where companies can lease space to test new technologies. It comprises an electrical hub located on the seabed and connected to the grid.

The five year Fortum project involves a number of local companies as well as Plymouth and Exeter universities, with the Commission providing funding of €17m.

Heli Antila, chief technology officer at Fortum, said: "On a global scale, this project is at the vanguard of wave power research."

A spokesman said the project will test the commerciality of a floating wave energy converter product called a Penguin, developed by Wello, another Finnish company in which Fortum has a minority stake.

Johnny Gowdy, of Regen South West, the region's renewable energy industry group, told the All Energy conference in Glasgow on Wednesday the Fortum announcement was a "breakthrough project for the wave energy sector and a key step to reaching the ambition to position the southwest as a world leading centre for marine energy".

The government-backed South West Marine Energy Park said its ambition was to be operating the first commercial wave farms by 2025. It also expected to see tidal stream energy produced off the Dorset and Devon coasts and energy harnessed from turbines fixed to the seabed in the Bristol Channel. The number of jobs in the marine energy sector would grow from 450 today to 3,000 by 2030, it said.

The region has already spawned a number of successful start-ups in tidal energy. In 2012 Alstom, the French engineering company, paid £45m to acquire Tidal Generation, a Bristol tidal stream project design and manufacturer that Rolls-Royce had earlier acquired off the founders.

Last week, Bristol's other successful tidal stream start-up, Marine Current Turbines, was sold by Siemens for an undisclosed price to Atlantis Resources, a Singapore-headquartered energy company that already had its design and engineering team in Bristol.

Atlantis has a portfolio of UK tidal projects, but its biggest scheme is the £70m Meygen project in the Pentland Firth in Scotland, which is set to be the world's largest commercial tidal stream project.

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