Wave energy company Carnegie reached its most significant technological milestone this week, announcing the first full-scale commercial wave energy unit has been successfully deployed off Garden Island.
Carnegie’s CETO technology has reached commercialisation after five years of small-scale prototype testing.
The ASX-listed company’s chief executive, Michael Ottaviano, said this was the first commercial scale wave energy unit ever deployed in the southern hemisphere.
The company has spent the past 18 months focused on proving the economics of the technology.
“That’s all that matters at the end of the day, you can have a nice clean, green, sexy technology but if it isn’t cost competitive you are wasting your time,” Mr Ottaviano said.
That process has taken nearly two years and $20 million, with $2 million from a state government grant.
He said reaching this milestone meant the company could now reach new markets and planned to focus on Western Europe, where wave energy was highly incentivised through government feed in tariffs.
It would also look at remote islands where there are good waves and no local energy supply, making wave energy cost competitive.
French state-owned power utility EDF is the first licensee of the CETO technology; the company – which is the largest power utility globally – has formed a joint venture with Carnegie to build a 15-megawatt wave energy project off Reunion Island.
In anticipation of the results from the recent commercial scale launch, Carnegie was also pre-selected by the Bermudan government to build a 20MW project. In addition, Mr Ottaviano said the company had a contract with the Irish government presently in the conceptual design stage that would move into the detail design phase within the next two months.
“The Irish government is 50 per cent funding the conceptual design of a 5MW project on the west coast of Ireland,” he said.
Mr Ottaviano said commercialising the technology was always going to be the most difficult stage.
“This was the really hard bit, deploying a commercial scale unit, it becomes at this point about making it incrementally more efficient, stripping costs out of it, getting economies of scale,” he said.
“From a technology risk point of view, the risk has been largely mitigated through this process over the last five years. Now it becomes about scale benefits and project deployment.”
