Since 3rd of October, the Saint-Anne du Portzic offshore test site hosts a new prototype of a wave energy production system from the Bordeaux-based start-up Seaturns. The world’s wave energy resource is huge and remains untapped for the moment. To exploit this alternative to carbon-based energy, the Seaturns start-up has come up with a promising system featuring innovative anchoring and a simple design that ensures great robustness.
From the outside, the prototype looks like a large cylinder swaying in the waves. But inside, it works a bit like a pendulum, driven by the movement of the water masses, which pushes the air through a turbine to produce electricity. Gabriel Canteins, project manager at Seaturns
After reduced-scale tests in several European wave tanks (Universities of Aalborg, Porto and Santander, Centrale Nantes), an initial 1:4 prototype was tested in Ifremer's test tank in Plouzané. It was then installed in early October at Ifremer's offshore test site in Sainte-Anne du Portzic, where future activities relating to marine renewable energies will be co-managed with the OPEN-C Foundation. For 10 months, Seaturns and Ifremer teams will be monitoring the prototype's behaviour to demonstrate its potential in real-life conditions.
After this initial offshore test phase, new deployment stages are being studied, including the validation of new 1:15 scale prototypes in a dock, at Centrale Nantes for example. A full-scale demonstrator (6 m in diameter and 15 m long) could then be deployed at another offshore test site. These tests are a first step towards the deployment of this new technology on a larger scale, in a multi-float configuration, which should lead to the marketing of very low-carbon electricity production units from 2025.
The prototype was designed as part of the IAS-WEC project, which won the French government's I-Nov innovation competition in July 2023, and is funded by the French government as part of France 2030 and by the European Union as part of the France Relance plan.
