The electricity sector is one of the sectors that powers our economies and lifestyles. We need energy for almost all our habits, including keeping our houses at pleasant temperature, cooking food, transport ourselves to visit our relatives, or carry out our work. Huge efforts have been done to transform the traditional, fossil-fuels powered energy sector (including electricity, transport, heat and industry) into a more renewable one. However, worldwide we are still in about 80% use of fossil-fuels in energy-related activities, which indicates a still long road to go.
In our company we do believe that we have in our hands the opportunity to make a change. Since 2006 we are investing our energy, efforts and knowledge into innovative Research and Development (R&D) Projects that aim to prove and show how our energy systems can be powered by offshore renewable energies. The oceans have huge energy opportunities for all of us as they can power 50% of the European energy needs.
Our company has been involved in leading R&D and demonstration projects on a constant basis. We are currently working on four different projects. The first one investigates a new type of wave energy principle based on lifting forces (the LiftWEC Project ); the second one looks into the opportunities of multi-use and combining different sea uses in the same space (the UNITED Project); the third one aims at proving how hybrid testing can make a step-change in wave energy development (the VALID Project) and the fourth one deals with the advancement of the CETO technology and its economic assessment, within the EuropeWave Programme (ACHIEVE Project).
In 2013 we were awarded a Danish-funded grant to develop a free to download economic model of widely use and in 2014 a national fund was awarded for a renewable energies grid-integrations project.
Other previous R&D efforts date back to 2009-2013, where we were involved in the Spatial Deployment of Offshore Wind Energy in Europe – named the WindSpeed Project – and Wave Energy Planning and Marketing – the WavePLAM project .