Hawaii, page-4

An excellent find, MF. I had been mulling over the strategic implications of CWE not gaining a $5M DoE grant. The signing of a contract with Columbia Power Tech shows that the US Navy is keeping its options flexible. It would be hard to believe that after all the high level visits of US dignitaries that CETO could attract no substantial US defence interest.

The detail in the DoE FOA specifications also stated that the Navy was going to provide only slack moorings for the successful candidate WECs. CETO requires rather massive rigid pier foundations. The fact that CWE had these already installed for the CETO 5 array and that the Garden Is base is frequently visited by US naval vessels means that officials can easily keep a finger on the pulse. For its part, CWE doesn’t really want additional projects in Hawaii that do not add any new development knowledge.

It would now be easy to imagine a scenario wherein about 2017 the US Navy buys arrays of five advanced WEC units from each of two suppliers (one of which could well be CETO) for the purpose of its own installation and long term testing (5 years?).

Juke