Irish company OceanEnergy has already tested its oscillating water column generators at significant scale in Hawaii, and it's just signed on to a four-year project to test, validate and commercialize its biggest unit yet off Orkney, in Scotland. The OE35, billed as the world's largest capacity floating wave energy device, is certainly an imposing thing to look at. While no dimensions have yet been drawn up for the machine to be built for Scotland as yet, the machine the company built for testing at a US Navy test site in Hawaii measures 125 x 59 ft (38.1 x 18 m), with a draft of 31 ft (9.4 m) and a total weight of 826 tons.
In testing, it ran at a capacity of 500 kW, but the device was, and is, capable of 1.25 MW. Building these things requires shipyard-level facilities – in the Hawaii machine's case, those of Oregon company Vigor. After construction there, the machine was towed to its test site for commissioning. You can get a sense of the scale of the thing in the video below; this is not a small-scale project.
