Flexible, scalable, affordable ocean energy, built up from soft robotics cells.

Technology

Almost all existing wave energy converter (WEC) designs rely on big chunks of dumb, rigid structure, which concentrate massive loads down onto a conventional generator and drivetrain. These are typically built from steel or concrete. When scaled up, these become increasingly expensive and unwieldy. This is one reason why many established WEC designs have struggled to get the device costs down, even when the physics works beautifully.

The EBB-FLOW Energy Solution

Our solution is to create a flexible structure, containing thousands of small, active, generating cells, so that now the primary structure and the power take-off are unified, meaning that a much higher proportion of the WEC's material is active in generation. Our cell-based approach makes use of existing mass production techniques, enabling us to drive down device costs.

Moving from a shipbuilding paradigm to one of mass manufacture also gives us a really interesting scaling pathway, allowing us to

power anything from a remote sensor to an AI data centre using the very same repeated building block.