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Construction of Wave Hub ‘beach pit’ gets underway
14 June 2010
The next stage of the South West RDA’s (Regional Development
Agency) pioneering Wave Hub project gets underway this week (June
14) with the start of excavation work on Hayle beach in
Cornwall.
Contractors will dig a pit to house a connecting block that will
join Wave Hub’s offshore cable with onshore cables linked to a new
electricity substation.
The work, which is being carried out by Dawnus Construction and
will take two weeks, will involve piling metal sheets into the sand
to a depth of around five metres to create a metal ‘box’ 10 metres
long and five metres wide, with a further five metres of sheet
above beach level. The sand inside the box will then be excavated
to a depth of about three metres.
When Wave Hub’s 25km, 1,300-tonne subsea cable is laid later
this summer, it will terminate inside the beach pit and be
connected to cables threaded through two ducts that have already
been drilled through the sand dunes at Hayle.
These cables will lead back to a substation currently being
built on the other side of the dunes, and ultimately connect Wave
Hub with the National Grid.
Guy Lavender, Wave Hub general manager at the South West RDA,
said: “Wave Hub’s grid connection is one of its major selling
points to the global wave energy industry so this is a vital piece
of work.
“Over the next two weeks beach users at Hayle are going to see
various bits of plant and machinery at the top of the beach while
the beach pit is constructed. Later this summer, once all the
cables have been connected together in the pit, it will be filled
in again and the sheet piling will be removed, so you’ll never know
we were there.”
Wave Hub is creating the world’s largest test site for wave
energy technology by building a grid-connected socket on the
seabed, 16 kilometres off the coast of Cornwall, to which wave
power devices can be connected and their performance evaluated.
The £42 million project has been developed by the South West RDA
and is a cornerstone of its strategy to develop a world class
marine energy industry in South West England.
Wave Hub’s cable, which is being manufactured by JDR Cable
Systems in Hartlepool, is nearing completion and the RDA has
appointed CTC Marine Projects based in Darlington, County Durham to
deploy the cable and hub during the summer. The substation building
is largely complete and the installation of more than £1 million of
electrical equipment will begin later this month.
Guy Lavender will be speaking about Wave Hub at the 3rd
International Wave Energy Summit in London on June 23-24, when
delegates from around the world come together to debate the issues
facing the global wave power industry.
Wave Hub is being funded with £12.5 million from the South West
RDA, £20 million from the European Regional Development Fund
Convergence Programme and £9.5 million from the UK government.
An independent economic impact assessment has calculated that
Wave Hub could create 1,800 jobs and inject £560 million in the UK
economy over 25 years. Almost 1,000 of these jobs and £332 million
could be generated in South West England.
Ends
For more information contact
Jason Clark, on 01208-77900 or via
jason.clark@dca-pr.co.uk
Notes to Editors
- Images: of Wave Hub and the cable can be
downloaded at www.flickr.com/photos/southwestengland.
Scroll down the right hand side of the screen and click on the
‘Wave Hub’ set.
- Film: of Wave Hub and the subsea cable under
construction is available here: www.youtube.com/southwestrda
- You can follow Wave Hub’s progress on Twitter (@wavehub) and on
Facebook.
- The South West RDA works for and promotes a
modern, stronger and more resilient economy across South West
England. Our work involves creating better jobs, successful
businesses, more prosperous cities, towns and villages within an
economy that uses less carbon and will still be thriving in 20, 50
and 100 years time.
- Wave Hub is a major marine renewables
infrastructure project that will create an electrical ‘socket’ on
the seabed in some 50 metres of water around 16kms (10 miles) off
the coast of Cornwall in South West England and connected to the
National Grid via a subsea cable. Groups of wave energy devices
will be connected to Wave Hub and float on or just below the
surface of the sea to assess how well they work and how much power
they generate before being commercially produced and deployed.
There are four berths available at Wave Hub, each covering two
square kilometres. Wave Hub will have an initial maximum capacity
of 20MW (enough electricity to power approximately 7,000 homes) but
has been designed with the potential to scale up to 50MW in the
future. The project will be built in the summer of 2010 with the
first wave energy devices expected to be deployed in 2011.
- Legal agreements have been signed with leading renewable energy
company Ocean Power Technologies Limited to take
the first berth at Wave Hub using its PowerBuoy wave energy
converter. Images of PowerBuoy can be downloaded at www.flickr.com/photos/southwestengland.
Discussions are ongoing with other device developers.
- JDR Cable Systems Ltd has been appointed to
manufacture the armoured 25 km (16 mile) 33kV cable and is
overseeing the manufacture of the hub assembly for Wave Hub at its
factory in Hartlepool in a contract worth £7.6 million. The cable
will weigh 1,300 tonnes. The hub will be about the size of a van
and will sit on the seabed. It will split the main cable linking it
to the National Grid on shore into four 300m cables to which groups
of wave energy devices can be attached and monitored for how they
perform.
- Powermann Ltd of Poole in Dorset has been
appointed to handle the £1 million onshore electrical works that
will connect Wave Hub to the UK’s National Grid network, and a new
electricity sub-station at Hayle is being built by Dawnus
Construction.
- In Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly the Convergence
Programmes are made up of European Regional Development
Fund (£347 million) and European Social Fund (£153 million).
Convergence Programmes will run until 2013 and follow the
successful Objective One Programme and prior to that Objective 5b.
For further information see: http://www.convergencecornwall.com/.
Convergence helpline telephone: 0800 0280120.
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