That’s where Christopher Ridgewell and Jussi Åkerberg, respectively CEO and CTO of AW-Energy, come in. In 2019 they submitted their WaveFarm project to the “Blue Economy Window”, an EU-funded financing facility.
The Finnish company had already developed, certified and demonstrated the WaveRoller, a submerged oscillating wave surge converter attached to the sea bottom near the shore. It generates electricity from the movement of the waves and is connected to the electric grid on land. A full-scale commercially-applicable WaveRoller unit was deployed in Portugal in October 2019. By integrating up to 24 WaveRoller units, the new project will deliver the world’s first large-scale, multiple-megawatt WaveFarm.
The view of developers, owners and operators of wave farm assets are at the core of the solutions implemented through the WaveFarm project. Practical experience gained through full-scale deployments enabled innovations that enhance the energy capture, increase the efficiency, extend the operational lifetime and streamline manufacturing, logistics, installation and maintenance processes.
"This project will help to displace initially more than 270,000 tons of CO2 [that is the equivalent of the yearly CO2 production of nearly 60000 cars] by 2030. It is also anticipated to create 1,500 new jobs in the post‐project period. Once fully deployed wave energy will deliver emissions savings measured in the billions of tons," said Jussi Åkerberg, CTO of AWE and manager of the project.
The WaveFarm project is funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund to create an industrial 'package' comprising the WaveRoller wave energy converters, all WaveFarm infrastructure, logistics, life-cycle services, product documentation and everything else that the customer needs to produce indigenous stable renewable energy.
The WaveFarm project will prepare two pilot WaveFarm projects that will deliver a total capacity of 15MW and will serve as models for additional future WaveFarms with up to 500 MW capacity-each one of those would fully cover the yearly need of a large town.
