Power Engineering - Wave energy project to be awarded €1.37m

31 July 2006 - Finavera Renewables subsidiary AquaEnergy has had it application to the European Commission under the Framework Protocol 6 (FP6) programme for support for a wave energy project in Portugal approved. As a result, the European Commission may contribute up to €1.37m ($1.7m) toward the project, subject to contracts being agreed.

Finavera Renewables is a private Irish renewable energy company focused on wind and wave energy development. The AquaEnergy Group is a 100 per cent owned subsidiary of Finavera Renewables.

The award of up to €1.37m may be granted under the European Commission's Framework Protocol 6 program as a contribution to the deployment of a 2 MW full
scale wave energy conversion power plant in Portugal. The proposed power plant will be situated in 60 meters of water approximately 10 km off the coastline midway between the Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Porto. Once successful operation of the plant has been demonstrated, the plant generating capacity is expected to be increased to 100 MW.

Alla Weinstein, CEO of AquaEnergy said, "This award reflects the last four years of work that the team has put into the project. With our partners, Dunlop Oil and Marine, Portuguese engineering group Kynamar and Labelec, a division of the Portugal's largest utility - Energias de Portugal (EDP), we will begin executing our deployment plan once negotiations with the European Commission and the partners are completed."

She continued, "The Portuguese groups in particular have been very supportive as they see the long term value in building a wave technology industry. It has been estimated recently that the country's coastline contains enough exploitable energy to contribute up 20 per cent of the country's total electricity consumption - a total value of over €5bn."

Jason Bak, CEO of Finavera Renewables commented "We are very excited about being in this position, at the right time and place. We are looking towards the future where wave power generation will join the commercial realm along with other types of renewables like wind energy.

Recent technological advances are moving wave energy forward to a cost competitive renewable source of electricity." Adding, "Not only does this award assist us in deploying our AquaBuOY technology at a true commercial scale, but along with our 1MW Makah Bay project in Washington, USA, we can now start to look at building a pipeline of other projects world wide."

Finavera Renewables took a ten per cent stake in AquaEnergy Group in April 2006 and in June announced that it had agreed to purchase the remaining share capital.

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