Celebrating five years of collaborative innovation in ocean energy.
After five years of supporting the European ocean energy sector to carry out collaborative innovation, the OCEANERA-NET COFUND project comes to an end in June 2022. Led by Scottish Enterprise the project has partners from across Europe – Basque Energy Agency, Region Bretagne, Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, Region Pays de la Loire, FCT (Portugal), CDTI (Spain) and the Swedish Energy Agency.
OCEANERA-NET COFUND will conclude with a Final Conference and on-line events in June 2022, to include presentation of project results and roundtable discussions on key learnings and future collaboration. Look out for the Final Conference, planned to take place at the Seanergy Conference in Le Havre, 15-17th June. Details will be published on the OCEANERA-NET COFUND website when dates are confirmed.
The 9 demonstration projects under the Co-funded Joint Call 2017 have now been completed These projects were awarded €7.8m, including €2.6m from the EU through Horizon 2020, co-funding with national and regional funds, supporting €14.5m of investment. Projects funded under the Second Joint Call, launched in January 2019, are ongoing.
The projects have allowed leading ocean energy developers in wave, tidal and ocean thermal technologies, together with supply chain companies, test centres and research institutes, to carry out key research and demonstration projects. These have both contributed to development, improved performance and reduced costs of the generation technologies and created new products and tools which can be used across the sector and beyond.
For example, Scottish tidal turbine developer Orbital Marine Power has worked on two key elements for the Orbital O2 2MW commercial demonstrator turbine, now deployed at EMEC and demonstrating great results. On TOPFLOTE, Orbital worked with global drivetrain solutions provider SKF to deliver a controller for floating tidal turbine, facilitating a significant increase in yield. On SEABLADE, Eire Composites have manufactured and evaluated new blades for a floating tidal energy converter, testing to validate a 20-year design life, now being tested on the O2.
In terms of enabling technologies, Brittany-based tidal company Sabella led the CF2T project to design and test an innovative hybrid foundation, combining steel and concrete. UMACK, led by Swedish wave energy developer CorPower Ocean, has develop a generic anchorfoundation- mooring-connectivity system, applicable to a wide range of wave and tidal energy converters, with potential for use in floating offshore wind. Similarly, TIM, led by Geps-Techno, has worked on single point moorings systems, including developing the design process and two new mooring solutions, for floating production plants and offshore monitoring buoys.
RESOURCECODE, led by the European Marine Energy Centre, has developed an open access, high resolution, North West Europe wave energy resource dataset, software toolbox and on-line portal. This will provide designers with the information and tools needed to push forward new marine renewable energy projects, improving cost, quality and time to market.
For further information, please contact:
Details of all the projects can be found on https://www.oceancofund.eu/
Karen Fraser, OCEANERA-NET COFUND Coordinator
Email: karen.fraser@scotent.co.uk