Global consortium completes new anchor test

The UMACK – Universal Mooring, Anchor & Connectivity Kit – project is being led by a global consortium and is funded by Scottish Enterprise, the Swedish Energy Agency and the European Commission.

Having completed pre-deployment checks at wave energy developer CorPower’s facility in Viana do Castelo Port, Portugal, the anchor has been developed to overcome problems with traditional anchors such as sandy conditions, stability and load capacity.

“The technology represents a geotechnical breakthrough allowing 4-5 times higher vertical load capacity compared to a standard monopile of the same size,” says CorPower.

“This may enable efficient low-cost anchoring for offshore structures across sectors such as wave and tidal energy, floating wind and aquaculture.

“It has been dimensioned to provide more than 15MN of vertical holding capacity, and resist a hundred million load cycles.”

The anchor will be installed into the seabed using a rapid, low-noise vibratory driving technique assisted by Diseko equipment. It will first be deployed at the Agucadoura site, which is part of CorPower’s HiWave-5 Project, where CorPower’s first commercial-scale C4 Wave Energy Converter (WEC) was deployed in 2021.

“This will later form part of a larger four-system WEC array, and one of the world’s first active wave farms generating energy to the grid,” said CorPower.

“HiWave-5 aims to deliver certified and warrantied WEC products to the market by 2024, propelling wave energy into the future green energy mix as a bankable technology.”

The consortium behind the UMACK project consists of CorPower Ocean and Sustainable Marine; geotechnical specialist Ternan Energy; mooring experts TTI Marine Renewables; EMEC (European Marine Energy Centre); and marine renewable energy modelling experts from the University of Edinburgh.