Funds put firm on crest of bid to make wave power

Australian
Tuesday 27/1/2009 Page: 16

Perth renewable energy developer Carnegie Corporation has locked in funding for the final stage of commercial development of its wave technology, under an agreement with British partner Renewable Energy Holdings (REH). The announcement came just days after Carnegie Corporation signed a memorandum of understanding with the Australian Department of Defence to potentially build a wave farm to provide power and desalinated water to HMAS Stirling on Garden Island off the coast of Perth.

Carnegie Corporation, which is also backed by Electricite de France, one of the world's largest electricity producers, hopes to build the first commercial CETO (named after a Greek sea goddess) wave power energy station next year for about $400 million. The industrial scale power station would generate 50 MWs of electricity a year, enough for 30,000 households, managing director Mike Ottaviano said.

"We'll generate electricity at around about the cost of a wind farm. We'll be more expensive than coal and gas, the same price as wind and cheaper than solar," he said. The first one will be the most expensive but we'd expect within three to five years to be fossil fuel competitive." The zero-emission wave technology concept was conceived by Perth offshore oil and gas expert Alan Burns.

It involves suspending buoys below the water's surface above pumps that use the motion of the ocean to drive high-pressure sea water along pipes to an onshore hydro-electric style electricity plant onshore. "Our approach is radically different," Mr Ottaviano said. "What everyone has done in the past is try to build a floating power station very large concrete and steel structures that bob up and down and harness that movement to generate electricity, which is sent over long subsea high-voltage cables into the grid.

"But the worst place to generate electricity is the middle of the ocean the mix of electricity and water is typically not a good one." Challenges include the high maintenance that sophisticated and delicate generating equipment attracts when its sent out to sea. The other obstacle that wave energy developers have faced is the waves themselves. "There's been a litany of disasters in the wave energy space of people launching wave energy prototypes and then, within a week or a month, these prototypes sinking because they've been hit by a large wave," Mr Ottaviano said.

Carnegie Corporation's technology was the only fully submerged technology of its type in the world. '' It never sees a breaking wave and there's no aesthetic impact," Mr Ottaviano said. Mr Ottaviano said Carnegie Corporation had "zero debt" as well as cash to get through the year. Despite the group's share price taking a "hammering", sliding from 30c to around 11c, Mr Ottaviano said he was optimistic about the clean energy sector's resilience.