WES Seeking New Innovations in Wave Energy

Wave Energy Scotland’s (WES) second competitive project call is now underway with the search for novel wave energy converter devices.

The national research and development body for the wave energy sector in Scotland is inviting applications for project costs via a contract for research and development services to develop novel wave energy converters.

Applicants will need to have already identified a concept and carried our preliminary feasibility work. WES will only seek to support truly novel devices which have not been developed and characterised before. However, WES will consider supporting existing device concepts which have previously progressed to higher levels of maturity but where significant improvement potential has been identified (and can be demonstrated) and it would therefore be appropriate to return to an earlier stage.

This is the second in a series of competitive calls from Wave Energy Scotland. The first call, for innovative power take-off Systems (PTO), closed on the 22nd of May and received a wide range of applications through the various call stages.

Tim Hurst, Managing Director, Wave Energy Scotland said: “This call is specifically designed to support wave technology developers who have taken an idea through the initial stages of the feasibility work. It is all about being able to prove the credibility of that work by providing evidence of the concept’s scientific, technical and engineering data. However, we will consider technologies which need to go back to more early stage testing because the work to date has identified a significant potential to do things differently.”

There are three stages to the novel wave energy converter call, with the ultimate aim of producing a scale prototype device. The competition is for the first stage where contracts may be awarded for up to £300k per project over a twelve month period for concept characterisation and refinement. The overall budget available from WES for projects is up to £2.4m.