New Jersey-based Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) has bagged €2.2 million under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The development has emerged at a stage when the company continues to strengthen its presence globally.
The grant to OPT is part of a total award of €4.5 million to a consortium of companies, including OPT, to deliver a PowerBuoy wave energy device under a project entitled WavePort, with a wave prediction capability and a "wave-by-wave" tuning system. It is anticipated that the PowerBuoy will be deployed at the Santoña site in Spain, where OPT has worked on a wave energy project under contract from Spanish utility company Iberdrola. Conditional on the signing of a Consortium Agreement and receipt of additional funding, it is anticipated that the PowerBuoy will be deployed at the Santoña site in Spain.
OPT will be responsible for the design, supply and deployment of the PowerBuoy and Underwater Substation Pod, with additional funding going to the remaining consortium members for the steel fabrication, wave-monitoring equipment, wave resource prediction research, system monitoring and project management.
Besides OPT, the consortium members include the Wave Energy Centre (Portugal), Fugro Oceanor (Norway), DeGima (Spain), the University of Exeter (UK), and ISRI (UK).
OPT will be required to seek additional funding to enable the completion of the WavePort project.
Under contract with Iberdrola, the company has completed in-ocean trials of OPT's Underwater Substation Pod (USP) product. The testing also opens a new revenue opportunity for OPT. The USP was designed in-house by OPT for use in a utility-scale wave power station at a site approximately three miles off the coast of Santoña, Spain.
OPT also remains focused on its near-term goal to complete the construction of the first of its latest wave power generation device, the PB150, for deployment off the coast of Scotland.
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