A 20MW facility is being constructed off the Cornish coast to allow the full scale testing of up to four different wave power machines.
Addressing a conference session at the Oceanology International event at London’s ExCel centre, Nick Harrington, who works for the South West of England Regional Development Agency said that the facility is being set up just to the North East of St Ives, taking the power ashore where there used to be a coal fired power station.
The facility will include four sub sea transformers to step up the 11kV generated by the wave power generators to 33kV for onward transmission. Planning permission was finally granted on September 17th 2007, and the first three participants are expected to be Pelamis Wave Power with their wave riding generator, ORECon, with its oscillating water columns and ‘Multi Resonant Chambers’ and Ocean Power Technologies with its oscillating ‘PowerBuoys’. He said there was, “Already a waiting list of two or three”.
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