Energy major Shell has joined the Renewables for Subsea Power (RSP) collaborative project which is currently powering subsea equipment off the coast of Orkney through a combination of wave power and subsea energy storage.
The £2million demonstrator initiative, which is currently nearing 12–months in the water, has connected the Blue X wave energy converter – built by Edinburgh company Mocean Energy – with a Halo underwater battery storage system developed by Aberdeen intelligent energy management specialists Verlume.
The fully operational project, located 5km east of Orkney Mainland, aims to show how green technologies can be combined to provide reliable low carbon power and communications to subsea equipment, offering a cost-effective alternative to umbilical cables, which are carbon intensive with long lead times to procure and install.
The new investment has come via the Shell Technology – Marine Renewable Program, a global R&D group pursuing the mission of finding, screening, testing, and developing marine renewable energy technologies to achieve more value with lower emissions and help build the critical energy infrastructure for the Blue Economy to grow and thrive.
They will now join project leads Mocean Energy and Verlume, alongside industry players Baker Hughes, Serica Energy, Harbour Energy, Transmark Subsea, PTTEP, TotalEnergies and the Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC).
The Orkney deployment is the third phase of the pioneering Renewables for Subsea Power project. In 2021, the consortium invested £1.6million into phase two of the program – which saw the successful integration of the core technologies in an onshore test environment at Verlume’s operations facility in Aberdeen.
In 2021, Mocean Energy’s Blue X prototype underwent a program of rigorous at-sea testing at the European Marine Energy Centre’s Scapa Flow test site in Orkney, where it generated first power and gathered key data on machine performance and operation.
Verlume’s seabed battery energy storage system, Halo, has been specifically designed for the harsh underwater environment, reducing operational emissions and facilitating the use of renewable energy by providing a reliable, uninterrupted power supply. Halo’s fundamental basis is its intelligent energy management system, Axonn, a fully integrated system which autonomously maximizes available battery capacity in real time.