Vattenfall Sinks Wave Power Business

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) - The floundering U.K. marine energy sector was struck another blow this week when Swedish power major Vattenfall AB (Stockholm, Sweden) announced that it was exiting the Scottish marine energy sector.

The company announced it is appointing a liquidator for its Aegir Wave Power (AWP) joint venture company, which it established in 2009 with long-time marine energy company Pelamis Wave Power (Edinburgh, Scotland). Pelamis went into administration at the end of last year. The move brings to an end the proposed 10-megawatt (MW) Aegir project off the Shetland islands, located off the north coast of Scotland. It had planned to construct a wave energy farm with 11 Pelamis wave energy converters that would have generated enough renewable electricity for approximately 8,500 households. Vattenfall plans to focus most of its renewable investment on windfarms.

Bjorn Bolund, head of Vattenfall's ocean energy R&D team, explained the decision: "In 2009 when we launched Aegir with Pelamis we had high hopes for wave power off Shetland. Unfortunately the wave sector has not developed as planned. Set against Vattenfall's pressing need to decarbonise our own power supply it has proved difficult to continue investing heavily in wave power in the absence of a commercial technology. Vattenfall's six-month review of our work in the wave power sector concluded that there remains long term potential -- not least because of the strong support provided by the Scottish Government and the unrivalled resource off the Scottish coast -- and so we will watch the sector very carefully in the hope that there will be progress toward securing a commercial technology."

Pelamis entered administration after failing to find funding to advance its technology. The company's converters were used in a number of leading pilot projects and last June they celebrated a connectivity milestone after clocking up 10,000 hours of collective operation at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) test site in Orkney. For additional information, see November 25, 2014, article - Scotland Pledges More Wave Energy Support.

In December, Aquamarine Power Limited (Edinburgh, Scotland) announced a significant scaling down of its business and German engineering giant Siemens AG (NYSE:SI) (Munich, Germany) announced its exit from the sector after just two years. For additional information, see December 9, 2014, article - Wave of Losses Swamps Marine Energy Sector.

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