On October 1st, 2020, the deployment of a seawater pumping prototype powered by wave energy and developed by the Norwegian company RWPower, was performed again at the PLOCAN test site (Canary Islands, Spain). This action receives funding from the European Commission through the BLUEGIFT project within the Interreg Atlantic Area program, and will have an estimated duration of between three and six months.
With this deployment, the test period, which started in January 2020, has been resumed after some design improvements. The survivability of the device at sea will be tested and estimations of the prototype’s pumping capacity depending on the prevailing wave height will be obtained. A potential application of this device is the pumping of seawater into desalination plants located near the coast without the need of electric power.
RWPower is a company founded in 2011 whose objective is to develop and market renewable energy generation devices, install and operate desalination plants and carry out research and development of new technologies based on renewable energy. A first stage of the project was carried out in 2016 and 2017 on the Atlantic coast of Norway, where an initial version of the device survived several endurance tests. Subsequently, in 2018 and 2019 different preliminary tests were carried out at the PLOCAN test site, that have evolved to this last phase of tests through the implementation of various improvements in the design as a result of the experience acquired in previous deployments.