OceanBased teams up with investment firms for Florida ocean current project

OceanBased Perpetual Energy has entered into partnership with advisory and investment firm GAK Capital to support the development of the project looking to capture the power of Florida’s Gulf Stream and convert it to clean electricity.

Under the agreement, GAK Capital will support the fundraising and marketing efforts for Phase One of OceanBased’s renewable ocean energy endeavor in Florida.

The first tranche of projected investments is expected to close before summer 2021, according to OceanBased.

In addition, the Dubai-based Capital Point, an investment firm founded in Saudi Arabia in 1975, is also funding the project, OceanBased said.

“GAK Capital has a successful track record since inception in 2015 of raising capital for leading asset managers, international direct investment opportunities and companies”, said Nasser Alshemaimry, CEO of OceanBased.

The initial phase of OceanBased’s project will focus on verifying compatibility between generation and subsea transmission equipment. Installation of up to 1MW of shore-connected capacity is expected to follow, reaching up to 20MW within as few as five years, the company informed earlier.

The goal of the project, with a focus on an area off the southeast coast of Florida, will be the installation of hundreds of megawatts of ocean current generating equipment.

So far, OceanBased engineers have mapped out how a subsea substation would receive incoming electricity from the Gulf Stream current flowing through the ocean current energy converters.

The electricity generated would then be transmitted through a relay substation connected by a subsea cable running 24 to 32 kilometres back to the seashore.

On land, an additional substation would connect to the national electricity grid or be tapped for other viable uses, such as powering hydrogen fuel plants, blockchain mining or server and data storage centers.