Opera sings for Global Maritime

Global Maritime is to provide mooring and risk management support to the EU Horizon 2020-funded Open Sea Operating Experience to Reduce Wave Energy Cost project.

The London consultancy is part of a 12-member consortium led by Spain’s Tecnalia for the three-and-a-half year programme with the objective being to progress offshore wave energy development, reduce costs and de-risk wave technology.

Global Maritime will be responsible for providing mooring and risk management support to the 42-meter oscillating water column device developed by Spain’s Oceantec due to be operational in August.

The wave energy converter will be deployed at Spain’s Biscay Marine Energy Platform up to two nautical miles offshore in 85m of water.

The device uses a novel shared mooring arrangement consisting of conventional tethers. The shared mooring system is designed to reduce the overall amount of mooring lines, share anchors and reduce costs.

Global Maritime will help ensure that the mooring system is robust, delivering telemetry and tension data, and carry out operational simulations.

Global Maritime chief executive David Sutton said: “For the first time, the wave energy industry will be able to access high quality, open-sea operating data, see some of the latest mooring and other technology innovations tested offshore, and look forward to long-term cost reductions of up to 50%.”

As the project continues into phase two in August 2017, Global Maritime will then help support the testing and integrating of further cost reducing innovations.

These include an elastomeric mooring tether, developed by the University of Exeter and which will reduce peak loads at mooring and hull connections. This, said Global Maritime, will improve structural survivability and reduce mooring line strength requirements and costs.

Other novel technologies tested through Opera include a bi-radial turbine and new predictive control algorithms. The cost-reduction innovations will initially undergo laboratory testing at the Mutriku shoreline wave power plant in Spain.

Other Opera consortium members include Ente Vasco de la Energia-EVE, Iberdrola Engineering & Construction, DNV GL, the University of Edinburgh, Kymaner, Instituto Superior Tecnico-IST and University College Cork.

Image: Anchor handling vessel (Courtesy of Tecnalia)