Overview

Wave energy conversion has been challenging engineers and scientists for several decades. Pioneering work was initiated in the late ‘70’s in response to the oil crisis and continued into the early 80’s. Research and development at Edinburgh University by Stephen Salter and elsewhere by others produced a number of inventions, but unfortunately government support was removed and with the privatisation of the electricity markets and a decade of low energy prices, further progress was limited. The growth in demand for renewable energy sources saw work on wave power re-start in the late 1990’s and there are now over 50 teams working on wave energy across the globe. AWS Ocean Energy is one of the very few who have reached any serious scale or attracted major investment.

Notwithstanding recent progress, many of the device concepts are essentially variations on the original configurations pioneered in the ‘70’s. These are characterised by articulated steel or concrete structures where relative movement between the parts or in relation to a fixed reference is converted into useful power by means of an air turbine, hydraulic system or other power take-off. At AWS Ocean we refer to all such devices as ‘first generation’ machines and, drawing a parallel with the consumer music industry, liken these to the wind-up gramophones which enabled the first mass distribution of music.

At AWS Ocean Energy, we recognise that the “wind up gramophones” were not the end solution, although they provided an essential development step in demonstrating the feasibility of a concept – in our case the generation of useful electricity from ocean waves. We also recognise that for wave energy to compete with other energy technologies, further transformational steps must be made. We must move beyond ‘first generation’ and develop the CD players and MP3 player equivalents in our field.

We believe that in the Archimedes Waveswing™ we have one of the best of the first generation wave energy devices, in terms of potential economics, reliability, safety and power density. Our first key objective is to demonstrate and prove this technology at commercial scale.

However, we also believe that commercial success will come through focussed research to develop next generation technologies and this forms an essential plank of our Technology Strategy. We have several exciting technology initiatives at early stage and will be progressing these over the coming months. We are disciplined in separating research from the delivery of projects such as the Waveswing™ demonstrator, whilst ensuring that essential information and learning is shared between teams as appropriate.