On May 12, a 42-meter steel buoy was towed from the Bilbao estuary to the open sea off Armintza. It is not the first time he has made that trip. It already did it in 2016, endured three winters with waves of up to 14 meters, generated electricity and returned to port with something equally valuable: data. Now it comes back improved. The Basque firm IDOM has released the Marmok A-5 again in the Cantabrian Sea, and this time he knows exactly what he has to prove.
It’s not just another test. The promise of wave energy is not small. As he explains to the magazine Renewable Energies IDOM wave engineer, Patxi Etxaniz: “The amount of resources available worldwide is brutal; if we are able to obtain that energy in an economically profitable way, we have solved the global energy problem.”
The problem, until now, has always been the same: extract it without ruining yourself in the attempt. The race to achieve this is fought by just a dozen or fifteen actors around the world: the Swedish CorPower, several Scottish engineering companies, companies from France, Wales, Finland and Italy, and Asian actors from Korea, China and Japan who, in the words of Etxaniz, “do not publish anything, they are very discreet.” IDOM is already in that group.
The Cantabrian piston. The Marmok is, in essence, a buoy with a cylinder of water inside. As detailed Europe Wavewhen a wave arrives, that column of water rises and falls like a piston, compressing and expanding the air in an upper chamber. In this way, this air flow moves a turbine that generates electricity and, finally, an underwater cable takes it to land.
The technology is called OWC – oscillating water column – and the new Marmok has improved it on three fronts, according to BiMEP: new turbine with controllable blades, intelligent control system with onboard batteries, and radically simplified anchoring. This latest change was born directly from one of the most costly and dangerous problems of the first campaign. As Etxaniz explained: “The anchorage we had worked well, but we needed a lot of divers, and they are expensive, and their work is dangerous: underwater, with ropes with a lot of tension, one of them whips you and you can have a serious problem.” Problem detected, problem solved.
In this new campaign, in addition, the Marmok will connect to the grid for the first time through the HarshLab platform, a floating laboratory integrated into the BiMEP infrastructure, which will allow both to evacuate the energy generated and to monitor the behavior of the system in real time.
Twelve years of work. The Marmok did not appear overnight. Its first models were tested at the El Pardo Hydrodynamic Experience Center in 2012. From there they went to the Tecnalia laboratories, then to the BiMEP offshore facilities in Mutriku, and finally to the open sea in October 2016, where it became the first wave energy converter connected to the electrical grid in Spain and one of the first in the world.
Behind that journey was the team from the Basque company Oceantec. IDOM saw the potential, hired them en bloc and integrated them into its structure. More than a decade of work, financing from the Basque Energy Agency and support from the European innovation program EuropeWave later, what began as a laboratory prototype is today, according to BiMEPa device ready to advance towards pre-commercial phases. As Borja de Miguel, project manager at IDOM, summarizes: in statements collected by Europe Wave: “Achieving secure installation and grid connection at BiMEP is a key step in bringing wave energy closer to commercial reality.”
What’s coming Over the next few months, the team will verify the performance of the new systems and progressively increase operations. The data collected by this campaign will serve two purposes: demonstrate results to EuropeWave and decide what the next phase of development will look like.
The objective is not academic. It means lowering costs until a Cantabrian wave can compete, in price, with any other energy source. There is no date for that yet. “It will depend on the investment,” says Etxaniz. But the window exists, the group of applicants is small, and Basque engineering has been learning to read the sea for more than ten years. The Marmok already knows how to survive three stormy winters. Now you have to learn how to do it cheaply.
Image | EuropeWave
Xataka | For years, wave energy was the ugly duckling of renewables. AI and data centers have taken a turn
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings