Marine Power Systems appoints Black & Veatch to combined floating wind and wave energy project
Published: 17 November, 2021
Black & Veatch has been selected to help guide Marine Power Systems across subsystem design coordination, systems engineering and the certification of Marine Power Systems’ flexible floating wind and wave energy generation hardware.
Black & Veatch is an employee-owned global engineering, procurement, consulting and construction company with deep experience and a long track record of innovation in sustainable infrastructure.
Working as an extension of Marine Power Systems’ technical team, Black & Veatch will lead specific elements of the project, providing technical quality assurance and helping identify and manage technical and programme risk. The role also encompasses quality, health, safety and environment management and supervision as well as supporting the full-scale Marine Power Systems’ technology certification process.
Marine Power Systems’ patented platform technology offers best in class cost compared with its peers due to the significantly reduced system mass. Moreover, its modular and flexible design, enables optimum local content delivery through a decentralised logistics model. These benefits provide utility scale developers maximum flexibility between reducing cost and increasing local economic benefits, whilst in parallel accelerating farm deployment at scale.
The wave energy converter has a wave energy capture mechanism – directly and efficiently harnessing both the heave and surge energy of the wave. Each energy absorber can capture over a megawatt of power, and each device has multiple absorbers, leading to significant multi megawatt power output per machine.
Robbie Gibson, Black & Veatch’s director for Renewable Energy in Europe commented, “A single system that simultaneously captures both wave and wind energy is a more consistent renewable ocean energy source, making maximum use of the lease area from a levelised cost of energy perspective and making intermittence less of a challenge. This project plays directly to our strengths and our experience in delivering major marine energy and offshore wind projects. Our broader design portfolio encompasses very many complex system configurations with multiple products and multiple technologies.”
Graham Foster, CTO at Marine Power Systems commented, “We are continuing to build our best-in-class team here at Marine Power Systems. Our partners and suppliers are very much part of that team and this latest appointment will play a crucial role in providing project and quality assurance. The team at Black & Veatch bring invaluable experience in floating wind and wave energy systems and marine structures, coupled with the ability to manage complex interfaces between them and oversee the pathway towards technology certification.”
Whilst offshore winds in shallow waters have been harnessed by fixed bottom wind turbines the wind and wave energy in deep water remains largely unharnessed and represents around 80% of the exploitable energy resources of our oceans.
Marine Power Systems have developed a flexible floating platform technology that is said to be the only solution of its type that can be configured to harness wind and wave energy either as a combined solution or on their own in deep water. Whilst the market for their technology is utility scale, grid connected farms, additional markets include oil and gas platform electrification and the growing hydrogen economy.
Marine Power Systems are now working on the deployment of a grid connected commercial megawatt scale wind and wave device in northern Spain at the Biscay Marine Energy Platform (BiMEP) as well as the deployment of a pre-commercial scale array at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), Orkney.
