What is the name of your organization?
Fetch Energy
What is the name of your solution?
Fetch Energy
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Power from the sea that doesn't cost the earth
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Bournemouth, UK
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
GBR
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
Wave power has enormous power generation and commercial potential, but challenges around high-capex intensity and low reliability have constrained this sector. In the UK, this has additionally been constrained to grid-scale applications, which makes them slow to deploy (because new grid connections, infrastructure and licensing are complex and operating a high backlog. Our approach turns that on its head. We have designed for lower capex, low-maintenance and high-reliability wave energy generators which can be used in a non-grid context to provide power at source, this unlocks wave power as a solution to whole new sectors of potential customers. The beachhead market we have selected is ports and shipping – our generators could be used either to provide auxiliary power/charging at anchorages for commercial ships, or to support ports in their de-carbonisation.
What is your solution?
We make wave energy generators. Fetch Energy Ltd is pioneering low infrastructure wave power devices that address previous industry challenges. We do this by having platforms that float, with a series of oscillating water columns (OWCs) within the platform. In each column is a float, which is the wave operated member (WOM). A key cause of unreliability in previous wave energy devices has been a high number of WOMs, which leads to a greater probability of failure. Fetch’s design reduces this to 1 per generator, which decreases the likelihood of failure. In order to extract power from the movement of the WOM in the OWC, Fetch has developed a unique technology called DPTO (Direct Power Take Off), which works by extracting energy from the float’s movement by magnetic induction. The float in the OWC essentially forms both a linear and rotary generator as it passes coils of wire embedded into the column’s walls. The design architecture has been refined through use of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) to optimize the flow of a wave into the OWC, the input parameters of these simulations have been modelled off wave conditions seen off the coast of the UK.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The uniqueness of our solution its ability to provide significant amounts of power at a size that is suitable for coastal deployments, that is modular and can provide power at source. This opens renewable wave power as a possibility for customers and communities for whom this would not have been possible previously. In addition to the benefits to ports and shipping to support their de-carbonisation goals, the de-carbonisation of the sector indirectly benefits the end customers of those industries. Our units are designed for a 20 year lifecycle, however, we anticipate that our customers will want to cycle their units every 5 years to take advantage of technology advances. We intend to operate a bring-back scheme, whereby units will be returned to us at the end of their use, as part of our commitment to circularity and sustainability. Units will be refurbished and then deployed at significantly reduced cost into secondary markets, this could include coastal communities in areas of the world with less mature grids or where land access is difficult. In these cases are units would provide clean power where the alternative is dirty power or none at all, in support of UNSDG 7 and 10.