Although the major wave energy potential is clearly offshore at larger depths, there are still major drawbacks to the commercial-scale deployment of offshore devices further out at sea, due to the necessity to rely on offshore maritime technologies, which on one hand are rather expensive and on the other hand are yet to prove their suitability for wave energy applications.
For this reason, AW Energy decided it was worthwhile assessing the value of on- and near-shore devices. “It is possible to use lower-cost modular technology and the devices are also much easier to maintain due to the proximity to the shoreline,” explains the company. To this end, AW Energy designed WaveRoller to covert surge energy in near shore areas.
Invented in 1993 by a Finnish professional diver, WaveRoller is cited by the company as being “the first solution of its type”. It is a technology that can be installed at a depth of 15-20 meters fixed at the sea bottom, and uses the horizontal movement of the waves at low depth to move its vertical wings.
The pre-commercial version of WaveRoller which is being installed in Portugal is co-financed by the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme through a project called Surge – Simple Underwater production of Renewable Electricity. The Surge project is one of the few demonstration projects worldwide at real scale that aims to contribute to the maturity of a technology for commercialization. This project started in 2009 and will last for three years, acting as one more important step to attracting wave energy technology to Portugal.
The Almagreira beach in Peniche was identified about four years ago as the most suitable for WaveRoller, and after almost a decade of R&D and testing the prototype WaveRoller1 at real scale at EMEC in Scotland and in Portugal, AW Energy will install and test its pre-commercial model during the spring of 2012.
Final deployment of WaveRoller will take place after the winter seas calm down, and once the plant is in place the sub-sea cable will be connected and Portugal will switch over to WaveRoller power.
An individual production-sized WaveRoller is designed to produce a nominal capacity of up to 600-800 kW of electrical power depending on the site. Since the plant construction is modular and there is no natural upper limit to the number of plates that can be used, offering a high level of scalability.
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