CorPower Ocean has completed the substation and site preparation work in Portugal ahead of marine installations for its flagship HiWave-5 grid-connected demonstration wave energy project.
The site located off the coast of Aguçadoura, south of Viana do Castelo, is now ready for the export installation, the Swedish company said.
Groundwork included horizontal direction drilling (HDD) for the pre-installation of a cable conduit in a work package delivered with local supply chain partners.
“Working alongside our local partners we identified the horizontal directional drilling process, to pre-install a cable conduit under the beach dunes at proper depth, as the most the effective approach to minimize impact on the local habitat,” said CorPower Ocean’s Portugal managing director Miguel Silva.
“This method ensured we could avoid trenching from the on-land substation, located within the sand dunes, through to the beach to allow cable pulling from the ocean into the substation. The approach chosen also minimized disruption for the local community and tourists, avoiding the use of excavators and open trenches.”
CorPower Ocean’s next-generation commercial-scale C4 wave energy converter (WEC) is currently being constructed in Portugal and Sweden.
Working in collaboration with several utility companies, it will be used to form part of a larger four-system array.
In preparation for the upcoming marine deployment, CorPower Ocean has also teamed up with international marine energy R&D consultancy WavEC Offshore Renewables to develop a robust offshore environmental monitoring system.
“A sophisticated environmental monitoring system has now been deployed at the HiWave-5 test site, 4km off the coast of Aguçadoura. This equipment, including F-pods and hydrophones, are recording baseline measurements, that are retrieved periodically, to assess the acoustic profile of our technology prior and post marine installation,” said Enric Villarín, project manager at CorPower Ocean.
“Cetaceans visual monitoring campaigns are also executed to monitor that our technology is not affecting these mammals negatively. To obtain real-time sea states characterization, wave measurement buoys have been deployed and are sending live data to our servers regarding, height, period and direction of the incoming waves.”
