The Aguçadoura test site is an offshore location in the north of

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...

where grid connected offshore

renewable energy Renewable energy (also called green energy) is energy made from renewable resource, renewable natural resources that are replenished on a human lifetime, human timescale. The most widely used renewable energy types are solar energy, wind pow ...

devices have been tested, for research and project demonstration. It is about 5 km (3 miles) off the coast of Aguçadoura,

Póvoa de Varzim Póvoa de Varzim () is a Portugal, Portuguese city in Norte Region, Portugal, Northern Portugal and sub-region of Greater Porto, from its city centre. It sits in a sandy coastal plain, a cuspate foreland, halfway between the Minho River, Minho ...

, about 35 km NNE of central

Porto Porto (), also known in English language, English as Oporto, is the List of cities in Portugal, second largest city in Portugal, after Lisbon. It is the capital of the Porto District and one of the Iberian Peninsula's major urban areas. Porto c ...

. It was established in 2001, and four developers have tested devices there: the Archimedes Wave Swing, three

Pelamis Wave Power Pelamis Wave Power designed and manufactured the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter – a technology that uses the motion of ocean surface waves to create electricity. The company was established in 1998 and had offices and fabrication facilities in ...

P1 machines as the Aguçadoura Wave Farm, the Principle Power WindFloat, and

CorPower Ocean CorPower Ocean AB is a wave energy device developer, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. They also have offices in Oslo, Viana do Castelo, and Stromness. The office in Viana do Castelo is an R&D centre that also serves as the manufacturing and se ...

's C4. Since 2021, it has been managed by WavEC and OceanACT.

Archimedes Wave Swing

In May 2004, a 2 MW (peak power output) Archimedes Wave Swing (AWS) was installed at Aguçadoura, after unsuccessful attempts in 2001 and 2002. The installation took three and a half days, and was eventually achieved by attaching the convertor to a pontoon and then submerging it and attaching to the seabed while the chamber remained floating. The AWS device on the submersible pontoon foundation was 48 m long, 28 m wide and 35 m high, and sat on the sea bed beneath the waves. It had a 9.5 m diameter moving captor with a stroke of 7 m that moved with the waves at a maximum speed of 2.2 m/s. It was connected to the Portuguese grid by a 6 km long cable. The testing was postponed until mid-September 2004, due to technical issues communicating with the device. At the end of October 2004 the testing license expired and the tests finished. The AWS intellectual property was later transferred to a Scottish company AWS Ocean Energy Ltd.

Aguçadoura Wave Farm

Three Pelamis P1 wave energy converters were installed at Aguçadoura in September 2018, and connected to the Portuguese grid. These each had a rated peak power of nominally 750 kW, giving a total of 2.25 MW installed capacity. There were plans to install a further 25 Pelamis WECs, but this never happened. The three machines were taken back to shore due to technical issues, but were never re-deployed due to the financial crisis. One of the project partners,

Babcock & Brown Babcock & Brown LP (B&B) was a global investment and advisory firm, established in 1977, based in Sydney, Australia, that went into liquidation in 2009. Babcock & Brown Securities LLC is an active investment banking firm focused on equipment an ...

pulled out after a major sale of assets to repay its debts. Another of the partners,

Energias de Portugal EDP (formerly EDP - Energias de Portugal and Electricidade de Portugal) is a Portuguese electric utilities company, headquartered in Lisbon founded in 1976 through the merger of 14 nationalised electricity companies. History EDP was founded as ...

(EDP), were not discouraged by the failure and signed an agreement with US-based Principle Power to develop floating offshore wind turbines.

Principle Power WindFloat

An initial agreement between Principle Power and EDP was made in 2009 to develop floating offshore wind turbines at the Aguçadoura site. A consortium called WindPlus was set up to develop the project; it included Principle Power, EDP, and

Vestas Vestas Wind Systems A/S is a Danish manufacturer, seller, installer, and servicer of wind turbines that was founded in 1945. The company operates manufacturing plants in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Taiwan, India, Italy, Romania, the Un ...

. In November 2011, the WindFloat 1

semi-submersible platform A semi-submersible platform is a specialised marine vessel used in offshore roles including as offshore drilling rigs, safety vessels, oil production platforms, and heavy lift cranes. They have good ship stability and seakeeping, better than dr ...

with a 2 MW Vestas wind turbine was installed around 5 km off the coast of Aguçaduora, following a 350 km tow from

Setúbal Setúbal ( , , ; ), officially the City of Setúbal (), is a city and a municipality in Portugal. The population of the entire municipality in 2014 was 118,166, occupying an area of . The city itself had 89,303 inhabitants in 2001. It lies withi ...

. The turbine was 54 m high, and with the foundation weighed 1200 t, and can be installed in water depths of over 50 m. The structure was not permanently installed, but held in place by drag-embedment anchors similar to those used to moor floating oil platforms. After five years, the testing programme was completed, the device having survived 17 m high waves, wind speeds of up to 111 km/h , and generated 17 GWh of renewable electricity for the Portuguese grid. The design of the platform was approved by certification body

Bureau Veritas Bureau Veritas is a French company specialized in testing, inspection and certification founded in 1828. It operates in a variety of sectors, including building and infrastructure (27% of revenue), agri-food and commodities (23% of revenue), mar ...

in April 2016. The WindPlus consortium has since developed the 25 MW WindFloat Atlantic project, about 20 km off the coast of

Viana do Castelo Viana do Castelo () is a concelho, municipality and seat of the district of Viana do Castelo District, Viana do Castelo in the Norte Region, Portugal, Norte Region of Portugal. The population in 2021 was 85,778, in an area of . The urbanized are ...

, some 30 km North of Aguçadoura. This has three WindFloat foundations each with a Vestas V164-8.4MW turbine, which began supplying power in January 2020.

CorPower Ocean HiWave-5

In late 2020, CorPower Ocean secured a 10-year licence from the Portuguese Directorate-General for Natural Resources that would allow them to test an array of CorPower wave energy converters (WECs) at the Aguçadoura site within the HiWave-5 project. A new subsea electricity cable was installed in Autumn 2022. The first CorPower C4 WEC was installed in September 2023, and started exporting to the Portuguese electricity grid in October 2023. It is planned to install a further three C5 WECs as a demonstration of a CorPack wave cluster.{{Cite web , date=5 December 2023 , title=TotalEnergies joins CorPower Ocean’s wave energy pilot project , url=https://www.offshore-mag.com/renewable-energy/article/14302324/totalenergies-joins-corpower-oceans-wave-energy-pilot-project , access-date=2024-04-07 , website=Offshore magazine

References

Wave power Floating wind turbines Wave farms in Portugal