European Programme to Fund Open Sea Testing For Ocean Energy
The EUR11m FORESEA project brings together Europe’s leading ocean energy test facilities to help demonstration of tidal, wave and offshore wind energy technologies in real-sea conditions. The project is funded by the Interreg NWE (North-West Europe) programme, part of the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund).
Led by the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), the FORESEA (Funding Ocean Renewable Energy through Strategic European Action) project will provide funding support to ocean energy technology developers to access Europe’s ocean energy test facilities:
- EMEC (Orkney Islands, UK)
- SmartBay (Galway, Ireland)
- SEM-REV (Nantes, France)
- Tidal Testing Centre (Den Oever, Netherlands)
The test centres will be supported by European industry group Ocean Energy Europe, based in Brussels, Belgium. The first call for applicants to apply for support packages is scheduled to be announced later this month.
High Costs of Real-size Testing of Tidal Energy
Investors in the ocean energy sector want to see that technology has been proven to work in the sea and at scale before committing. However, the cost of pre-commercial demonstration of full-scale ocean energy technology is high. This results in the so-called 'valley-of-death' phenomenon and prevents products reaching the market.
To address this issue, FORESEA will offer a series of funding and business development support packages to TRL 5+ ocean energy technology developers seeking to test and demonstrate in real-sea and grid-connected conditions, and leverage the further investment needed to take their product to market.
Rémi Gruet, CEO of Ocean Energy Europe, said that the size of the prize for commercialising ocean energy is huge. In Europe alone, the industry plans to deploy 100GW of generation capacity by 2050, meeting 10% of Europe’s electricity demand. Not only does this mean generating clean and secure renewable energy, it also means creating a new industrial sector based firmly in Europe. This year he sees pre-commercial ocean energy farms hit the water in Europe, ahead of anywhere else in the world. The industry and its partners need to continue to build on this momentum by bringing new technologies to market through research, demonstration and innovation activities.
