initial feedback from the conference

I spoke to Tim Sawyer and Greg Allen (COO) at the CWE stand at the conference. Here is what I got, off the top of my head, from my brief lunch time visit . If I have missed anything I should have the opportunity to clarify details tomorrow.

REDP funding - everyone seems to think it is a few weeks off however there is even the chance that we may be waiting until Copenhagen in December! Apparently the decisions have been made but the announcement timing etc has gone all the way up to Kevin Rudd. Other avenues are being explored as a Plan B. Advances have been made from instos to invest in CWE but they have been rejected. Management does not want to sell off the farm, so to speak. The 5 MW plant will still go ahead with or without any REDP funding. It is clear to me that it will be situation normal - full steam ahead at CWE HQ if the REDP does not eventuate, but management will have a little more work to do to arrange the extra funding for the 5 MW plant.

5 MW small scale demonstration plant - $36 - $40 million is required for 5 MW first demo plant. They already have 12.5 million WA LEED funding which is suitable for this purpose. 25 - 30 CETO III units anticipated. Garden Island has not yet officially been announced as the 5 MW site but seems most likely. Albany will not be the commercial demonstration site because it is a high stress environment (I think I heard up to 14 m wave heights!) and they don't want to fall at the first hurdle with equipment failures. Garden Island is seen as a less risky environment and is most likely but still not officially announced.

First CETO III deployment - will be off Garden island in 24 m depth and will occur in Nov/Dec of this year. Will allow CWE to do testing which will then provide data for the design of the 5 MW plant. This will then give data that will feed into the next stage and so on up to 30 MW+ which is full scale commercial demonstration. The undersea foundation for the first CETO III will cost about $1.5 million but this is high due to the high cost of mobilisation and de-mobilisation of the ship and engineering. All the logistsics for this to come from Henderson which is in Cockburn Sound which is adjacent to Garden Island.

Buoyant Actuator - almost all of the IP is in this item. The new BA is nothing like the CETO II BA. It will be a 'squashed obloid' (my words) of 7m diameter and 5 m height. Will have a steel frame and a plastic (need to confirm that) outer skin. Will be almost totally full of sea water. Buoyancy is provided by foam pockets in the frame. They will weigh 1 tonne, although I don't recall if that was full of water or not. (I assume not - I did a quick calc and the volume of a sphere of 6 m diameter is about 110 cubic metres and each cubic metre of water weighs approx. 1 tonne, is that correct? So a BA full of water will be 111 tonnes, approx. That is a lot of force going up and down!)

Pumps - I always assumed the pump was a proprietary item and there was a lot of IP involved. They said they had flirted with the idea of designing and manufacturing the component themselves and then realised that an off the shelf "hydraulic ram" performs exactly the same function. These are already used in the oil and gas industry and in tjhe hydro-electric industry. There are a number of local manufacturers that can provide these. Wikipedia link here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_ram

Site design - each site is all about the optmisation of factors like depth, distance from shore, wave heights, pipeline layouts (distance to the shore adds huge pipeline costs), generator site, array design, deployment strategy etc etc. The arrays may be slightly angled against the wave front to reduce interference between the BA's. There will be a maximum of three CETO's deep to reduce the energy wash off effect. CET II's may be deployed in modules of 6, d=for example. All this as yet not fully defined as the design will come from results from the CETO III testing and then the design for larger scale commercial demonstration will come from results for the 5 MW small scale plant and so on.

More after tomorrow. I know there was question about where they were at with the CETO III development but I understand the first unit is being manufactured now and will be deployed at Garden Island Sepia Trench Nov/Dec this year so we can assume the design is complete. I will try and confirm this tomorrow.