Making wave energy competitive with wind and solar energy

Project Information

HACE

Grant agreement ID: 815590

DOI

10.3030/815590

Project closed

EC signature date 27 April 2018

Start date 1 March 2018

End date 30 June 2018

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

HYDRO AIR CONCEPT ENERGIE - HACE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - HACE (Making wave energy competitive with wind and solar energy)

Reporting period: 2018-03-01 to 2018-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

HACE has developed a wave energy capture technology that will enable it to compete with wind and solar energy, while greatly reducing intermittence problems.

At the end of 2017, the technology is at the TRL5 stage and at this stage HACE believes it has a revolutionary technical solution. But many steps remain to be taken to launch the company on its markets.

In 2018, two major objectives are defined:

1/ Put a 50 kW demonstrator into service.

2/ Analyse market access conditions. To do this, we conduct a market study, a technical and economic analysis, and a Freedom to operate analysis.

Those two goals beeing achived, we now focus on the scale up of our Wave Energy Recover and on the way to market.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Since the beginning of the project, we have identified subcontractors with whom we have worked and validated an overall architecture of our system to make it resilient. We have developed and manufactured valves that operate at low pressures and withstand storms. Together with a turbine specialist, we developed and manufactured a unidirectional turbine with a low pressure field, a flat operating curve and an efficiency of 90%. We finally assembled all the sub-elements. In parallel, we conducted market research, met with prospects and developers, obtained letters of intent and formed our opinion on the first customer targets to be reached.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

From now on, we wish to exploit the results of our H50 proof of concept, use the lessons collected during the construction phase of this proof of concept to produce an H200 and H1000 that will incorporate an industrial approach, a 70% load factor target, and a 5 cts/kWh LCOE target on mass production into their design.

This will enable us to put on the market a competitive, almost non-intermittent and highly acceptable energy supply (low visual impact of our devices), accessible anywhere in the world.

Picture of the three arms Proof of Concept