AquaHarmonics wins USD-1.5m wave energy grant from US DOE

AquaHarmonics has won the USD-1.5-million (EUR 1.4m) grand prize in a 18-month design-build-test competition for developers of ocean wave energy converters (WEC), the US Department of Energy (DOE) said on Wednesday.

The runner-up in the so-called Wave Energy Prize competition is CalWave Power Technologies, which got a USD-500,000 grant, while Waveswing America ended on third position and received a USD-250,000 cash prize.

The competition started in April 2015, when 92 teams were registered. In March 2016, a panel of judges selected nine finalists and two alternates that were then tasked with developing a 1/20th-scale model of their WECs. They tested their prototypes at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin at Carderock, Maryland.

“This competition set a difficult threshold of doubling the energy captured from ocean waves, and four teams surpassed that goal,” said Lynn Orr, the DOE’s Under Secretary for Science and Energy.

The DOE will publish data from all the finalist teams’ test results next year.

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.935)

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