The Wave Energy Canary Islands (WECAN) project aims to demonstrate and validate the lessons learnt during 10 years of wave energy technology design and offshore operation, breaking some of the barriers historically slowing the development and commercial implementation of the wave energy technology and sparking a faster development of the technology.
Wave energy remains as a largely untapped source of energy despite the good projections and benefits. Ocean energy has the potential to generate 350TWh of electricity, meeting up to 10 % of Europe’s demand by 2050, and remains aligned with the European low-carbon economy and fight against climate change, avoiding the equivalent of 276m tons of CO2 emissions per year. Also, the ocean energy supply chain is truly pan-European, with both leading companies and supply chain SMEs spread across the EU’s Member States, including landlocked countries like Austria, with long experience in hydro-equipment manufacturing, sparking high quality jobs generation and a new, better flow of economy for Europe.
WECAN project, proposed to the recently announced European call for proposals “Innovation Fund – Large Scale Projects”, aims to provide high resilience and competitive power output partly covering the energetic needs of Bocabarranco desalination plant in Gran Canaria currently running on diesel generators, avoiding fuel consumption and GHG emissions, saving cost while achieving a more sustainable facility, the total wave power to be installed as part of this project is 2MW by 2028, running for 10 years until 2037 when results will be evaluated.
DESAL+ LIVING LAB confirms the interest and supports the contribution of the WECAN project to the application of wave energy technology to desalination process in the Canary Islands archipelago.
Photo: W1, individual wave energy converter as unit example for the final array configuration.
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