Milestone for Garden Island microgrid as Carnegie gets back on the wave

Carnegie Clean Energy’s cornerstone Garden Island Microgrid in Western Australia has notched up a new first, with the successful delivery of more than 1000MWh of renewable electricity from the wave power-integrated system to HMAS Stirling – Australia’s largest naval base.

The “significant milestone” was marked in Carnegie’s quarterly report for the period ending December 31, 2019, in which the newly re-instated ASX company said it was making advances on its CETO wave technology as promised in its 2019 pitch to shareholders.

Carnegie’s refocus on its proprietary and world-leading wave power generation technology has been the theme of Carnegie’s reboot, after a combination of bad luck, bad timing and poor decision-making saw the company placed into voluntary administration in early 2019.

“Since coming out of administration in October, the Carnegie team has been completing a range of corporate activities associated with the reinstatement of the business, delivering on the CETO technology development pathway outlined in the Prospectus and operating Carnegie’s Garden Island Microgrid asset,” the report says.

“The funds raised are supporting the development of the core CETO technology and intellectual property, the key unique aspects of the technology that set CETO apart from other wave energy technologies and which is intended to deliver long term value to Shareholders.

“Carnegie has made notable progress on its machine learning activities, a core stream of the development pathway. Carnegie anticipates providing a status update on the development of the machine learning Wave Predictor in the coming weeks.”

The company said it the quarter had also seen it awarded two weeks of wave tank testing at the Cantabria Coastal and Ocean Basin in Spain, funded through the European funded Marinet2 program, which supports the research, development and testing of Offshore Renewable Energy systems.

On the home front, Carnegie also received $865,000 from ARENA, as the final payment for its CETO 6 Project, the document says.

On Garden Island – which was officially switched on in August of last year – Carnegie said it was working to strengthen the value of the asset and maximise its profits while addressing the initial challenges of a recently operating microgrid.

“This includes working through changes and impacts associated with Department of Defence’s ongoing electrical upgrades at HMAS Stirling and working closely with a contractor to optimally operate and maintain the asset,” the report said.

“For example, work was undertaken during the quarter to replace a small number of faulty panels with replacements supplied under warranty.”