NEWS > Construction of Wave Hub beach pit gets underway
Published: Monday, 28 Jun, 2010
The next stage of the South West RDA pioneering Wave Hub project got underway on 14 June 2010 with the start of excavation work on Hayle beach in Cornwall.Contractors will dig a pit to house a connecting block that will join
The next stage of the South West RDA pioneering Wave Hub project got underway on 14 June 2010 with the start of excavation work on Hayle beach in Cornwall.Contractors will 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.
The work, which is being carried out by Dawnus Construction and will take two weeks, will involve piling metal sheets into the sand to a depth of around five metres to create a metal ‘box’ 10 metres long and five metres wide, with a further five metres of sheet above beach level. The sand inside the box will then be excavated to a depth of about three metres.
When Wave Hub’s 25km, 1,300-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 is creating the world’s largest test site for wave energy technology by building a grid connected socket on the seabed, 16 kilometres off the coast of Cornwall, to which wave power devices can be connected and their performance evaluated. The GBP42 million 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.
Wave Hub’s cable, which is being manufactured by JDR Cable Systems in Hartlepool, is nearing completion and the RDA has appointed CTC Marine Projects based in Darlington, County Durham to deploy the cable and hub during the summer. The substation building is largely complete and the installation of more than GBP1 million of electrical equipment will begin later this month.
Guy Lavender spoke about Wave Hub at the 3rd International Wave Energy Summit in London on June 23-24, when delegates from around the world came together to debate the issues facing the global wave power industry. Wave Hub is being funded with GBP12.5 million from the South West RDA, GBP20 million from the European Regional Development Fund Convergence Programme and GBP9.5 million from the UK government. An independent economic impact assessment has calculated that Wave Hub could create 1,800 jobs and inject GBP560 million in the UK economy over 25 years. Almost 1,000 of these jobs and GBP332 million could be generated in South West England.
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