Annual Report 2018
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IRELAND

Declan Meally and Patricia Comiskey Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland

 

PROJECTS IN THE WATER

Irelands Galway Bay Test Site was awarded a new 35 year lease this year and the award of the lease allowed for the test site to be recommissioned in July 2018. Since recommissioning, the test site has deployed a number of smaller projects, and the pipeline for 2019 looks promising in particular there has been much interest in the floating wind test berth. 

Some of the smaller projects deployed on site in the latter half of 2018 included a glider with acoustic sensors, the glider was deployed and piloted at the test site where it collected acoustic data 24 hours a day over a period of 7 days. The project will facilitate an acoustic landscaping of the area and a comparison between the glider hydrophone data against the fixed PAM system on the subsea observatory.   

Anteia: Funded by an EU project Jerico-Next, a Spanish company called Zunibal deployed their wave monitoring equipment at the test site. Zunibal are testing a directional wave buoy called Anteia. This project will validate this technology against the permanently deployed Waverider buoy at the test site. Two other projects funded under Jerico-Next were also deployed on the observatory relating to microplastics and video analysis of benthic communities. 

45863-figure-1.pngFig. 1 - Eforcis testing in Galway Bay

eForcis: Also deployed on site in 2018 was a small-scale energy harvesting device called eForcis. The energy harvesting device is housed in a water tight box which sits on top of a Marine Institute buoy and uses the motion of the buoy and simple electromagnetic principles to harvest energy.

The energy generated in this novel device can be used as an alternative power source to address electricity supply shortages in off-grid marine devices operating in harsh marine conditions.

The Spanish company are funded by the EU Ocean-EraNet programme and the SME. instrument to trial and validate the eForcis design in SmartBay and will perform a second trial in 2019 of beForcis, which is an improved eForcis device.  

 

 

In 2017, DesignPro were funded €1.9 million from EU’s Horizon 2020 SME Instrument Programme for a €2.7 million project to develop and commercialise small-scale turbines. The 27-month project kicked-off in July 2017 and the company have achieved a number of milestone deliverables including the deployment of a 25 kW turbine at the SEENEOH test site in Bordeaux, France where it is undergoing rigorous performance and environmental testing. 

63267-figure-2.pngFig. 2 - DesignPro 25 turbine at the SEENEOH test site 

 


 

PLANNED DEPLOYMENTS 

36624-figure-3.pngFig. 3 - OE Buoy Build December 2018 

New Wave Technology trading as Ocean Energy plan to test a half scale model in US Navy WETS facility in Hawaii in Q1 2019. The project is co-funded by both SEAI and DOE in the US.

The project has been in place since 2016 and up to now has focussed on transport and access to the site.  It is stage/phase 4 of the Development & Evaluation Protocol for Ocean Energy technology, the prior stages having been completed with financial assistance from the Marine Institute, Enterprise Ireland, EU funding and SEAI.

The prior stage included several deployments at the Galway Bay Quarter Scale test site – during which the device accumulated over 24,000 hours of open water testing.