Aquamarine closes £10 million funding

News today is that Aquamarine, developer of the Oyster wave devices recently installed at EMEC in Orkney, has closed a £10 million equity financing (as a precursor to another £40 million to be raised later). Details here.This funding, together with the deployment at EMEC, projects Aquamarine into the top rank of wave energy devices.

The company's press release is here.

Aquamarine gets (really) serious

Aquamarine has just announced the appointment of a new CEO, Martin McAdam, who was last seen at Airtricity where he was Chief Operating Officer. Details here.

This is interesting, as Martin's clearly a serious player in the renewables space. Now, I think it's fair to say that some of the marine developers are thinly capitalised (putting it politely) and might struggle to attract a candidate of this calibre. So we take this appointment as very positive for Aquamarine, as we (perhaps rashly) infer a real commitment from Scottish and Southern to the success of the business, which might well take more investment than the £6.5 million it's put in so far.

An alternative interpretation would be that perhaps Mr. McAdam made such a huge pile of cash out of the Airtricity sale that he doesn't have to worry about money!