Wave power developer Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) has netted $2.75 million from the US Navy to fund the second stage in the company’s existing wave energy project.
OPT has completed the first stage of a four-year $15 million project to test the company’s PowerBuoy technology.
The next stage of the Littoral Expeditionary Autonomous PowerBuoy (LEAP) programme, which is aimed at providing the Navy with non-grid connected power at sea, will see the building and testing of a system off the New Jersey coast over the next year .
Ultimately, the Navy hopes to use OPT’s PowerBuoy in combination with at-sea sensors, communications and real-time signal processing to create a vessel detection system.
One of the company’s 150 kW PowerBuoy devices has already been deployed at the Marine Corps Base in Hawaii and connected to the grid.
The devices are now being built at facilities in Oregon on the US west coast and in Scotland.