Swedish wave energy developer CorPower Ocean has secured funding from Vinnova, Sweden’s national innovation agency, to test AI-driven performance and control enhancements for wave energy technology. The WACE (Wave energy AI-based Control Enhancement) Project is now underway and will continue until November 2025.
CorPower Ocean is partnering with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), a leader in marine engineering research. This initiative follows CorPower Ocean’s recent EUR 32 million Series B funding round, aimed at advancing wave energy as a mainstream renewable source. The investment came after successful testing of the company’s commercial-scale C4 device, which withstood record-breaking Atlantic storms while efficiently generating power.
WACE Project Lead and CorPower Ocean Control Engineer Gabriel Forstner emphasized the potential of AI-based methods to enhance wave energy converter operations. “The optimal operation of wave energy converters is one of the key factors to lower the levelized cost of energy (LCOE), ultimately making it an attractive part of the future clean energy mix,” he said. “The main goal of the WACE Project is to combine AI methods with optimal control to enhance our existing operating strategy and further improve the performance of our point absorber type wave energy converter.”
The project will use a model-based design framework to develop an AI-driven control strategy. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test setup will validate the approach in real-time conditions. CorPower Ocean expects its wave energy converters (WECs) to be deployed in arrays or farms, generating significant data to refine model-predictive control strategies. The combination of AI with model-based control aims to optimize performance while ensuring stable operation.
A key feature of CorPower Ocean’s technology is its ability to adjust to ocean conditions, reducing storm impact while enhancing power capture in regular waves. This has been demonstrated with the C4 device in Aguçadoura as part of the HiWave-5 demonstration project. The company compares this tuning capability to modern wind turbines, which adjust blade pitch to optimize performance based on wind conditions.
Forstner highlighted the broader applications of AI-driven optimization beyond wave energy. “The idea of this project is to utilize an existing control algorithm for WECs and combine it with AI-based methods to improve the performance of the overall closed-loop control scheme,” he said. “This approach is not limited to WECs and can be extended to improve existing control algorithms in a wide range of industrial applications.”
CorPower Ocean’s technology is being integrated into wave farm projects along the Atlantic Arc, including sites in Scotland, Ireland, Portugal, and Norway. One of these, the Saoirse Wave project off the coast of County Clare, Ireland, is being developed by the state-owned energy supplier ESB. This pre-commercial phase will deploy CorPower Ocean WECs as part of a CorPack cluster and has secured EUR 39.4 million in EU Innovation Fund co-funding.
