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.
Additional information
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. Find out more at www.southwestrda.org.uk
- 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: www.convergencecornwall.com. Convergence helpline telephone: 0800 0280120.
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