30th Executive Committee Meeting, 9-10 May 2016

Brief review of the 30th Executive Committee Meeting held in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 9-10 may 2016.

The Executive Committee (ExCo) of Ocean Energy Systems (OES) Technology Collaboration Programme, within the International Energy Agency (IEA), announces the outcomes of its 30th meeting, held in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 9-10 Mar 2016, hosted by the Swedish Energy Agency. Comprehensive overviews of international activities and achievements on ocean energy were shared during the ExCo meeting, and are presented below.

Major outcomes of the OES projects:

• Under Task 5 “The Exchange and Assessment of Ocean Energy Device Project Information and Experience”, a series of workshops have been organized by NREL on behalf of the US Department of Energy. The last one “Ocean Energy Policy: Lessons Learnt” was held on 12 May in Smögen, Sweden, hosted by the Swedish Energy Agency. The outcomes of this workshop will be available on the OES website.

• The OES approved a new Task on investigation and evaluation of OTEC resource to be conducted by a group of interested countries in this topic, led by Japan.

• Another new Task approved by OES is on Numerical Validation Codes for Wave Energy, in which several countries are interested in doing collaborative work.

• The State of Science Report prepared under Task 4 on Environmental Issues is now available reviewing all the major interactions that potentially place marine animals or habitats at risk from marine energy development.

• Access the Tethys Knowledge Database continuously updated under Task 4, which contains hundreds of journal articles, technical reports, presentations and research studies on the environmental effects of marine energy developments;

• Visit the Interactive web-based GIS mapping application with detailed global information related to ocean energy.

• Visit the International Conference on Ocean Energy (ICOE) repository website and access all papers from previous conferences.

• A thorough investigation of the Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) for wave, tidal and OTEC technologies has been published by the OES.

• Task 9 “International technology Roadmap” in concluded and soon an updated “International Vision for Ocean Energy” Brochure will be published.
 

FRANCE – Observer

The French tidal power engineering group Sabella has been successfully testing the D10 prototype (500 kW unit) connected to the local grid since September 2015, installed at Fromveur Strait, close to Ouessant (Ushant Island offshore Britany), in collaboration with Akuo Energy. This is the first of a 2 MW array planned for this site. In January 2016, the tidal turbine achieved 50 MWh of electricity production.

The Paimpol-Bréhat project, with total installed capacity of 1 MW, jointly developed by DCNS and EDF with OpenHydro technology, has already seen the installation of the first of two 500 kW tidal turbines in France in January of this year (off Île-de-Bréhat near Paimpol in Britanny). The second turbine is on site and will be connected to the grid over the next few months.

Two tidal array projects are also in the pipeline at Raz Blanchard (Alderney Race, Normandy): 14 MW for the Normandie Hydro project (EDF/DCNS) and 5.6 MW for the Nepthyd project (ENGIE/Alstom-GE).

NEMO, the 10 MW ocean thermal energy project to be developed off the west coast of Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, is benefiting from the complementary know-how of two partners - DCNS and Akuo - with NER300 support. OTEC is seen in France as an opportunity for non-connected islands. Recently, DCNS has signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with the OTEC Centre of the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM OTEC) to conduct together a pre-feasibility study aiming at identifying the potential opportunities of developing a pioneer OTEC plant on the Malaysian island of Layang-Layang.