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Ecotricity’s wave power project completes first stage testing

Ecotricity’s Searaser wave power prototype successfully completed first stage testing this weekend, the company said on Monday.

Ecotricity have spent the last 18 months, with marine energy consultants DNV GL Group, optimising the design and modelling outputs of the device in real world conditions around Britain’s coast before testing was carried out at Plymouth University’s CoastLAB wave tank over the weekend.

The Searaser’s inventor Alvin Smith said in a statement that the device was specifically designed to address the two major problems of cost and variable output in the deployment of renewable energy.

Smith added that resilience is the key to making wave power efficient and therefore cost effective.

“We’ve put Searaser through the most extreme testing regime here at CoastLAB and it’s passed every challenge,” Smith said.

Searaser does not generate electricity at sea, instead using wave motion to drive a piston suspended between two boys to pump highly pressurised seawater ashore to a hydropower turbine that produces electricity. It could also pump into coastal reservoirs where the water can be released day or night to make renewable electricity on demand, the Ecotricity said.

Ecotricity founder Dale Vince said: “Out of the wind, the sun and the sea, generating electricity from the sea is by far the most difficult due to the hostile ocean environment – it’s also the least advanced of the three technologies but it has enormous potential.”

“We believe these ‘Seamills’ have the potential to produce a significant amount of the electricity that Britain needs, from a clean indigenous source and in a more controllable manner than currently possible.”

The company said it hoped to have a full scale prototype in the ocean in the next 12 months, with the first commercial ‘Searasers’ producing electricity within a few years.