Contractors will this week begin work on the next stage of the South West Regional Development Agency's pioneering Wave Hub project with excavation work on Hayle beach in Cornwall. They will begin 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.
Being carried out by Dawnus Construction, the work will take two weeks and will involve piling metal sheets into the sand to a depth of around 5m to create a metal ‘box’ 10m long by 5m wide, with a further 5m of sheet above beach level. The sand inside the box will then be excavated to a depth of about 3m.
When Wave Hub’s 25km, 1300-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.
“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," said Guy Lavender, Wave Hub general manager at the South West RDA. “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.”
Test site for wave energy technology
Wave Hub is creating the world’s largest test site for wave energy technology by building a grid-connected socket on the seabed, 16k off the Cornish coast, to which wave power devices can be connected and their performance evaluated. The £42m 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.
Cabling for Wave Hub is being manufactured by JDR Cable Systems in Hartlepool, while the RDA has appointed Darlington-based CTC Marine Projects to deploy the cable and hub during the summer. The substation building is largely complete and the installation of more than £1m 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 1800 jobs and inject £560m in the UK economy over 25 years.
