It's been a long time, but we're back

After an extended break, learning about the oil services economy and spending some time trying to provide innovative services to reshape the offshore wind maintenance challenge, Redfield Consulting is relaunching. We are looking forward to getting re-engaged with the offshore, wind and tidal industries, and in parallel, John Aldersey-Williams plans to undertake a PhD in the economics and policy of this sector, to understand its economic, socio-economic and green costs and benefits better and to boost the support we can offer to its players. We're already realising how things have changed - a number of tidal developers are now developing significant projects, offshore wind is progressing at a truly industrial scale but the wave sector seems to have lost pace. Over the coming weeks, we'll be catching up on this, and also developing a roadmap for funding for marine developers. It's good to be back.

Orecon

I saw a press report that ORECon was being wound up. Details are here.

The CEO said that the company had been negotiating to participate in the WaveHub project, and that it had been unable to secure funding.

ORECon's technology is an Oscillating Water Column device, which uses multiple resonant feeder pipes to optimise energy capture. I wonder if there's any IP worth buying from the Liquidator?


Apologies for brevity - posted from my iPhone

Hours on the clock

Marine Current Turbines have now racked up 1000 hours of export to the National Grid, as reported here.

MCT claims an average capacity factor of 66% for the period of operation. We have calculated a capacity factor, based on ROC register figures, which shows a steady(ish) increase to around 25% in November 2009. This calculated CF does not make any allowance for downtime, availability of marine mammal onservers, or (crucially for MCT) the limitations imposed by daylight-only working.

Since daylight in November is less than 50% of the time, and the trend is upwards, we can see that a claimed 66% capacity factor in December could be realistic.

If true, it's excellent news for the company and the technology, as it's always all about cost per MWhr, and more MWhrs means a better metric.

More interesting marine recruitment

Interesting to see that Atlantis Resources is beefing up its management team too, with the hiring of Jim Forbes as Chairman of the UK business.

Details here.

So just like Aquamarine, there's a real strengthening of management teams going on in the space right now, and a real commercial focus on the new hires.

Aquamarine recruitment

Did anyone else notice that Aquamarine just recruited Richard Round, former FD and briefly MD of Novera as their new Finance Director?

This should strenghthen their fund raising capacity and demonstrates a new level of seriousness in the marine space.

Exciting!



Apologies for brevity - posted from my iPhone