MegaRoller
The MegaRoller project produces many benefits for the whole industry. You can find the latest project news and videos, participant introductions, and much more on the dedicated MegaRoller project website. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 763959
The project started in May 2018 and ended in December 2021. There were ten partners from across the European Union; from Finland, ABB Oy, AW-Energy Oy, Hydman Oy, Hydroll Oy, and Teknologian tutkimuskeskus VTT Oy; from Portugal, K2Management Lda and WaveEC/Offshore Renewables – Centro do Energia Offshore Associacao; from Norway Sintef Energi AS and Universitetet I Bergen; and from Germany Leibniz-Institut Für Neurobiologie.
MegaRoller is a collaborative research and innovation project which aims to develop and demonstrate a next-generation Power Take-Off (PTO) solution for wave energy converters.
The proposed PTO technology for a 1MW oscillating wave surge converters (OWSC) device is based on multiple hardware and software innovations. MegaRoller is therefore expected to generate extensive know-how in the area of PTO design and control system, at the same time decreasing the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) produced thanks to OWSC devices below €150/MWh.
The methodologies used in the project will be applicable to many other types of wave energy converters. MegaRoller will also propose new standards for PTO control, thus benefiting the whole ocean energy community.
The MegaRoller technology provides three unique empirically validated benefits:
Increased Power Take Off reliability, efficiency and power density.
The technology developed by the partners through the project has been validated at AW- Energy’s full scale testing facility.
Wave-by-wave damping control, advanced efficiency control, energy storage control, power smoothing, wave prediction and frequency response.
project
In the short term, the project hopes to increase the power conversion from 70 to 88%, improve reliability of the converters (double the lifetime and service intervals), decrease operation & maintenance costs by 75%, boost power density by 2.8 times and improve power quality.
By 2050, MegaRoller’s 40,000 MW power plants could generate 400,000 jobs in Europe only and decrease CO2 emissions by 110 M annually.
The full-scale PTO will be validated in a PTO test rig available at AW-Energy in Finland.
- create power matrices for the wave conditions of different sites
- fine-tune the PTO control algorithms
- certify the operation of the PTO
- ensure that the produced electricity conforms to the various grid codes of different market areas.
To read the scientific publications, open research data, and public deliverables created during the project on the MegaRoller community in Zenodo.
Details are also available about the project on the EU Horizon Results Platform, available here.