Offshore Deployment of Marine Substation in the Lysekil Research Site

The wave power project at the Division of Electricity, Uppsala University, started in 2001. The first full scale wave energy converter (WEC) was developed and deployed outside the Swedish West coast in 2006. Since then, another 13 WECs have been deployed. In order to transfer the absorbed wave energy to the shoreline, offshore marine substations have been proposed as an offshore interconnection point. The substation offers several benefits, such as a compatible gridconnection, reduced number of cables, improved transmission efficiency and individual WEC control. A major expense in wave power technology is the associated offshore operation costs. As the substation may need maintenance within a few years interval, it is important to minimize its deployment costs. In this paper, a very inexpensive deployment strategy is proposed, and described step by step. The procedure has been verified experimentally offshore, with pictures from the operation presented. The cost with this strategy is reduced by almost a factor of ten compared to the previous installation procedure.