EU backs project to advance wave energy with €4 million grant

Business Developments & Projects

December 25, 2023, by Nadja Skopljak

The European Union has awarded a €4 million grant to a project aimed at harnessing the untapped potential of wave energy.

The SHY Project (Seawater HYdraulic PTO using dynamic passive controller for wave energy converters), a collaborative initiative dedicated to advancing wave energy, received the grant from the Horizon Europe funding program for research and innovation.

The project consortium comprises nine organizations across seven European countries, including the National University of Ireland Maynooth, Technical University of Denmark, OEMs FibronPipe (AT) and LESER (DE), specialist SMEs Julia F. Chozas (DK), Applied Renewables Research (UK) and Marine Systems Modelling (NL), the Spanish offshore test site PLOCAN, and wave energy technology developer Wavepiston (DK & ES).

The SHY project is expected to play a pivotal role in unlocking the potential of wave energy by developing key components of a seawater hydraulic power-take-off (PTO) system, coupled with an advanced control strategy. This dual focus aims to reduce the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) while concurrently minimizing the environmental impact.

The development and validation efforts are centered around four principal and interconnected products, all aimed at reducing the LCOE, ensuring high reliability and operability of wave energy converters (WECs), and minimizing the overall lifecycle environmental impact.

According to Wavepiston, the choice of its technology ensures practical applicability and provides a reference framework for the development of key components, enabling comparability of results, benefiting the specific technology but also other hydraulic-based WECs.

The SHY project’s control co-design approach considers the control strategy for power capture and the impact on capital and operational costs (CAPEX and OPEX). The validation of PTO hardware and controllers will be conducted through hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) testing, followed by final validation using an offshore test bench to ensure real-world applicability.