Carnegie Wave Energy has received the final grant payment from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) for the CETO 5 Perth Wave Energy Project.
Carnegie received the final payment of Au$935,000 ($675,000) from ARENA for the successful completion of the Project including 12 months of operation.
This final payment marks the end of the ARENA Perth Project funding agreement and brings the total ARENA funds received for the Project to Au$13.1 million ($9.45 million).
After achieving over 14,000 hours of deployment across over its 12 months of operation, collecting a wealth of key engineering and environmental data, validating its computational models, and having met all requirements of the funding agreements, Carnegie completed the operational phase of the Perth Project at the end of 2015.
All three CETO 5 units were safely retrieved and brought back to shore for inspection, analysis and decommissioning ahead of the CETO 6 Project activities.
As part of its internal analysis of the Perth Project, Carnegie conducted a performance assessment of the CETO 5 Project, based on industry standards for performance assessment of wave energy converters, which found excellent correlation between the modelled performance and the measured performance, according to Carnegie.
Subsequently, an external review of the project has been carried out by ARENA’s independent technical engineering firm which confirmed that the Project met all its objectives.
Carnegie’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Ottaviano said: “The Government grant support for the Project has enabled Carnegie to deliver Carnegie’s first CETO wave energy array here in Western Australia. The Project achieved a number of world firsts and paves the way for the delivery of Carnegie’s commercial product platform, the CETO 6 generation. We’d expect to begin to place first component orders with suppliers for our Garden Island CETO 6 project from next quarter.”
Earlier this year, Carnegie announced the receipt of all Western Australian Government grant funding for the CETO 5 project.