Pembroke Dock-based Mainstay Marine Solutions (www.mainstaymarine.co.uk), a workboat builder and marine engineering firm, has been awarded a contract by AMOG Consulting Ltd for the construction of a one-third-scale model of its Wave Energy Converter (WEC) technology demonstrator device.

Simple in design, the WEC is tuned to maximise the power from incoming waves by extracting energy from the motion of its pendulum structure.

AMOG is an award-winning team of consulting engineers, project managers and technicians, with its headquarters in Australia and offices in the UK, the USA and Colombia.

Stewart Graves, managing director, said: “Mainstay is delighted to have been awarded the AMOG contract against European Union competition. This exciting project enhances our ever-increasing portfolio of marine-energy fabrication projects and is a great endorsement of our capabilities.”

AMOG’s WEC project manager, Jon Gumley, said: “We’re excited to have Mainstay Marine Solutions commence work on the fabrication of the AMOG WEC.

"The signing of this contract ends an intense period of detailed design activity. Now we’re looking forward to a close working relationship with Mainstay on the build phase, followed by a successful testing campaign in the summer.”

It is anticipated that — by the end of this summer — the WEC will be deployed at the University of Exeter’s FabTest site in Falmouth — a ‘nursery’ test site for wave-energy devices.