Energy Giant to Help Automate Wave Energy Demo in Portugal

For exam­ple: now giant energy com­pany Metso with its 27 mil­lion employ­ees world­wide, is work­ing on extremely inno­v­a­tive under­wa­ter wave energy tech with wild and crazy start-up AW-Energy: the inven­tor of the ground­break­ing Waveroller.

Next sum­mer, Portugal (get­ting 45% renew­able power by the end of this year) is host­ing the Waveroller’s full scale 300 kilo­watt demon­stra­tion off the coast of Peniche. The renew­able energy har­nessed from the Atlantic Ocean will be trans­ferred through a sea cable to the national grid and mea­sured by Portugal. I first wrote about the com­pany last year.

As new CEO John Liljelund told me in Finland, Portugal’s per­mit­ting is refresh­ingly prac­ti­cal and not bur­dened with a lot of sec­ond guess­ing: “They say does it make any harm? If no, then, OK. Prove it. They say, ‘Let’s do it: then we’ll see.’ This a prob­lem; this is not.’”

Metso is sup­ply­ing AW-Energy with the infor­ma­tion sys­tem to ana­lyze the pre­vail­ing wave con­di­tions, and to respond to those chang­ing con­di­tions, with around-the-clock auto­mated con­trol of the oper­a­tion of the unmanned power plant. Both sys­tems are the first of their kind in the world. It is unusual to see big com­pa­nies be so help­ful to lit­tle com­pa­nies, and so invested in com­pletely new concepts.

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