A collaborative project to power subsea equipment with wave power and subsea energy storage has taken to the seas in Orkney, Scotland.
The £2m demonstrator project, called Renewables for Subsea Power (RSP), has connected Mocean Energy’s Blue X wave energy converter (pictured) with a Halo underwater battery developed by Aberdeen intelligent energy management specialists Verlume.
The two technologies have been deployed in the seas off Orkney and have now begun a minimum four-month test programme where they will provide low carbon power and communication.
They will also provide infrastructure including Baker Hughes’ subsea controls equipment and a resident underwater autonomous vehicle provided by Transmark Subsea.
The European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) has supplied instrumentation to measure the speed and direction of currents during the deployment, whilst Wave Energy Scotland has provided £160,000 to support the integration of the umbilical into the wave energy converter.
The project aims to show how green technologies can be combined to provide reliable low carbon power and communications to subsea equipment, offering a cost-effective alternative to umbilical cables, which are carbon intensive with long lead times to procure and install.
The Orkney deployment is the third phase of the Renewables for Subsea Power project which is being supported by consortium partners which include UK-based energy companies Harbour Energy and Serica Energy.
Each phase of the programme has also been supported by grant funding from the Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC).
In 2021, the consortium invested £1.6m into phase two of the programme – which saw the successful integration of the core technologies in an onshore commissioning test environment at Verlume’s operations facility in Aberdeen.
They are now testing the entire system at sea at a site 5km east of the Orkney Mainland, raising the system’s technology readiness level (TRL) to 6-7 (actual system completed and qualified via test and demonstration).
In 2021, Mocean Energy’s Blue X prototype underwent a programme of rigorous at-sea testing at the European Marine Energy Centre’s Scapa Flow test site in Orkney where they generated first power and gathered significant data on machine performance and operation.
The Blue X programme was made possible through £3.3 million from Wave Energy Scotland which supported the development, construction and testing of the Blue X prototype at sea.
Mocean Energy managing director Cameron McNatt said: “This is a natural next step for our technology.
“The new test site east off Deerness offers a much more vigorous wave climate and the opportunity to demonstrate the integration of a number of technologies in real sea conditions.”