Carnegie jacks up CETO capacity in bid to take wave power mainstream

ASX-listed renewables developer Carnegie Clean Energy has revealed a number of major upgrades to its ground-breaking wave energy technology, the CETO 6, as it works towards its goal of building large-scale wave farms.

Carnegie, which began life as Carnegie Wave Energy, said on Tuesday that it had boosted the nominal capacity of its latest CETO unit to 1.5MW, up from 1MW – the currently deployed CETO 5 was 240kW – to make it more cost competitive with other mainstream renewable technologies.

The Perth-based company has also developed a new, networked design for foundations for a large-scale wave farm – a project it has been working on in partnership with the University of Western Australia.

The changes follow last month’s announcement from Carnegie that it was moving its CETO project to Albany, in the south of Western Australia, after winning a tender for a $15.7 million state-government grant.

The grant will mean that Carnegie will install the first of its revamped CETO 6 technology in Albany in the summer of 2019/20 – rather than at its Garden Island facility, near Fremantle, as previously planned.

The Albany project is a forerunner of a possible 20MW wave energy plant and a bigger 100MW facility to follow.

As well as the changes to capacity, the tanks of the upgraded CETO 6 units, pictured above, will also be wider in diameter than their predecessors – a total of 20 metres – to allow for the power system’s pumps to be inbuilt, rather than separate.

The evolution of Carnegie’s CETO technology has taken place over the course of a decade, with around $140 million invested along the way, including the recent $15.75 million grant from the WA government, and another 11.6 million of ARENA funding, reallocated for the Albany deployment.

Carnegie CEO said this week the company was delighted with the updated CETO 6 design, and as determined as ever to make its mark on the global renewable energy market.

“As other renewable technologies become more cost competitive, we need to continue to drive innovation into CETO and be prepared to disrupt our own thinking,” Dr Ottaviano said.

“Wave energy is the last globally untapped renewable resource, and in the best locations delivers energy 24/7.

“By effectively harnessing this massive untapped resource in waves and converting it to energy, this technology will be game-changing,” he said.