€19m funding secured for Portuguese wave energy

The Ondas de Peniche (ONDEP) project has been awarded €19 million from the EU’s Horizon Europe fund to deploy a 2MW wave energy array in the surfing hub of Peniche, Portugal.

Four WaveRoller wave energy converters will also be featured in the array.

Starting in October 2024, it will design, manufacture, test, deploy and operate a pilot wave farm that will be connected to the grid and once the project has ended, continue generating electricity for another eight years.

The project has been a long time coming: lead technology provider AW-Energy, with other partners, has been working on it for two decades, CEO Christopher Ridgewell says.

“ONDEP’s mission over the next five and a half years is to address the technical challenges of future large-scale wave farms, ensuring the technology’s reliability and scalability,” said Rémi Gruet, CEO of Ocean Energy Europe, a network of ocean energy professionals.

“The project will also establish a comprehensive, end-to-end European supply chain to support the deployment of GW-scale wave energy across Europe and beyond, marking a significant step towards the industrialisation of wave energy, the largest untapped renewable energy resource in the world.”

Wave stream and tidal energy projects are slowly emerging in the energy generation landscape, with the UK making headlines recently, awarding six projects Contracts for Difference with a total capacity of 28MW in its recent auction round.