The Indian Ocean island Reunion has taken shipment of the first Ceto 4 wave power generator from WA company Carnegie Wave Energy. This will be the beginning of a 15MW wave energy generation facility. The first stage of the project is being funded by a grant from the French government.
From the company’s press release, 26 September:
Wave energy developer Carnegie Wave Energy Limited (ASX: CWE) is pleased to advise that its next generation commercial scale CETO unit (CETO 4) has been manufactured and delivered to its deployment location on Reunion Island by French marine defence contractor DCNS.
The unit will now undergo pre-deployment testing similar to the CETO 3 pre-deployment testing undertaken by Carnegie at its Fremantle test facility in Western Australia earlier this year. Once pre-deployment testing is completed, and subject to completion of some final installation aids, offshore installation is currently scheduled to take place during the Southern Hemisphere summer.
The CETO 4 unit will be deployed and tested offshore at the Reunion Island project site. Successful testing and operation of CETO 4 is planned to be followed by a grid-connected 2MW CETO project at the same site with subsequent further expansion to 15MW. Activities to date have been two-thirds funded by French Government grants and the grid connected project will receive a marine energy feed-in tariff.
Carnegie’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Dr Michael Ottaviano said,
“The CETO 4 project represents the first joint project activities of Carnegie, EDF EN and DCNS. As well as testing the CETO system in a different wave climate, we’ve taken the opportunity to test some new design ideas. We’re grateful to the support of the French Government and the local Reunion region.”
The activities associated with Reunion Island and CETO 4 follow on from the signing of a CETO technology licence and joint venture agreement with EDF EN in 2009 and a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with EDF EN and DCNS in 2010. The MoU outlined the intention of the parties to work together
yes2renewables.org 
Carnegie have been posting encouraging reports for some time and it is great to see them continue. Wave power has been sought for over 50 years, but without real success. The Carnegie process just could be the one to change that.
It is worth going to their website to learn more. See:
http://www.carnegiewave.com.au/
And see here for a totally different style of wave energy being used in Spain (which is probably not so scalable)
http://www.offshorewind.biz/2011/09/22/wave-energy-goes-online-in-spain/
why do you have to put these things in the water? Can’t you put them on land so they don’t impact on people…
Leroy just about anything you can think of has been tried, even things that look like snakes and floating buoys, tanks that fill as waves slosh against them (and drive a turbine as it drains) and more. But the trick is to harvest the wave energy, and that means the equipment has to be in the water.
The Spanish model is embedded in a seawall, and as a swell hits that wall, some water is driven into the pipes containing turbines. I suppose there is some shore-side infrastructure to connect to the distribution system but I don’t think you are looking at a big array. Really, the optical impact is very small.
The Carnegie model is underwater, reducing navigational hazards and is otherwise invisible. Probably they will be protected by a no-go zone to stop anchors landing on the equipment, and I don’t know what sort of footprint that might amount to. It is likely that the equipment would become fish habitats over time by way of an artificial reef.
Carnegie have apparently generated pressures sufficient to drive the desalination process, which is a huge step because desal uses large amounts of energy.
Your wish to avoid impact on people is a widespread one, and fair enough I think. But the Newcastle area, as an example, gets thousands of tonnes of coal dust settling on it each year. The emissions from burning coal are also harmful. If we want to fix those problems surely we have to change something; wave power is one of those changes that will give us (all going well) huge quantities of clean sustainable power, with very few negative externalities. It will be interesting to see how the fossil fuel industry acts to affect government policy with respect to wave power. Or if there will be a swell of NIMBY’s surging in to stop wave technology (puns intended).
😀
Geoff, I think you just missed the note of sarcasm in Leeroy’s post. But full marks for a well written response! I do wonder what the anti-renewable-energy brigade will do when other technologies also become cost competitive (and that probably won’t be long in the case of solar thermal). You will occasionally notice a reference to “renewables” in the statements of some anti-wind campaigners, when speaking of their economic benefits. Perhaps they will also discover landscape and health reasons to oppose solar,wave and geothermal power?
Yes Ben I did miss Leeroy’s sarcasm, but no matter.
And thanks for your compliment 🙂
He actually presented an opportunity to get something positive said about wave power, renewables and sustainability. I suspect there are a lot of closet environmentalists out there!
I think it is an index of the quality of debate when we compare renewable costs with the costs of the existing fossil fuel paradigm – even though the issues with it are well understood. The truth is we have never acknowledged the real costs – that includes environmental costs – of our fossil fuelled energy. If it was properly costed out to include the damage to landscape and health the comparative story would be quite different.