Wave Power Project

Trials to assess the potential of wave power are still very much in their infancy with most effort currently being concentrated on wind power as a renewable resource.

But this is now slowly changing with the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), a new Highlands & Islands Enterprise initiative set to get underway in Orkney that has involved the setting up of four test bays for wave generation devices, permitting the devices to be 'plugged' into the National Grid.

However, one problem to overcome was to how to visually monitor the wave generators and this resulted in Hydro Contracting, one of the main contractors involved in the project, to ask Scottish Communications to help out.

"if an alarm is raised indicating that something appears not to be working properly, then one of the first things an operator wants to do is to view the wave generation device to assess whether there is a problem or not," says Paul Rae of Hydro Contracting.

The CCTV system that will be supplied by Scottish Communications conforms fully with the software requirements of the contractors and it is envisaged that images from the CCTV system will be made available to a webcam system to allow on-line visitors to the EMEC website to view the wind generation devices.

Brian Davidson of Scottish Communications said: "This is an exciting and worthwhile project and we're delighted to be able to play a small but hopefully important role in its development."

For further information contact: enquiries@scottishcommunications.com