Led by NordicNinja VC - the largest Japanese backed VC in Europe focusing on Deep Tech and Climate Tech, SEB Greentech the cleantech investment arm of the SEB bank, and InnoEnergy – one of the most active cleantech investors in Europe. The investor consortium also includes Santander Asset Management, a major financer of renewable energy assets, Iberis Capital, a leading Portuguese Venture Capital and Private Equity investor, and Cisco Investments, who have a strategic focus on using technology to help accelerate the transition to clean energy, plus existing shareholders.
Established in 2012, CorPower Ocean has now secured €95m in funding from private and public investors and successfully demonstrated four generations of its unique technology, addressing the two main challenges which have held back commercial adoption of wave energy – 1. storm survivability and 2. efficient power generation in normal ocean conditions.
CorPower Ocean co-founder & CEO Patrik Möller said, “Today’s announcement follows breakthrough results reported earlier this year from the firm’s ocean demonstration at the Aguçadoura site in northern Portugal, where the CorPower C4 became the first commercial scale wave device to successfully demonstrate the ability to survive the biggest Atlantic storms combined with a large power generation capacity with respect to the size and cost of equipment.”
Möller added, “We’re hugely grateful for the support and confidence from this premiere group of investors who bring crucial experience and capacity to support our mission to power the planet with clean electricity from ocean waves. This financing combined with the technology breakthrough recently reported delivers a firm message about wave energy’s readiness for widescale adoption and its key role in the global energy transition.”
Wave farm projects are being developed by customers using CorPower Ocean's technology along the Atlantic Arc, including sites in Scotland, Ireland, Portugal and Norway. One project is being developed by Ireland’s state-owned energy supplier, ESB, off the coast of County Clare, following two decades of investigating a wide variety of technologies. The pre-commercial phase of the Saoirse Wave project, will involve CorPower Ocean WECs (Wave Energy Converters) as part of a CorPack cluster. The project has secured co-funding from the EU Innovation Fund.
Wave energy represents one of the largest untapped clean energy sources, amounting to more than all of today’s hydro or nuclear capacity. Significant resource lies along the European Atlantic, US west coast, South America, Africa, India, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Local jurisdictions are fast adopting wave energy targets, including the UK and Portugal, with the US recently proposing new instruments to ramp up commercialization and industrial development.
With a consistent and complementary power profile, wave energy can play a key role in stabilizing the clean energy mix, helping to fill the gaps of wind and solar, supporting ambitious 24/7 carbon-free energy targets adopted by data centers worldwide. It comes amid growing demand for 24/7 clean electricity from broader industrial electricity consumers and policymakers to decarbonize and mitigate climate change.
