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Blog: A week in Canada – ICOE 2014

The EMEC team had a very interesting and busy week at the International Conference for Ocean Energy (ICOE) in Nova Scotia, Canada, last week, leaving our offices in Stromness with an amazing view over our wave test site, and arriving with what seemed like half the marine renewables industry on the flight over to Halifax from London (a few of those pictured below).

The week started off with a brilliant day visiting the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE) and Parrsboro Harbour where ICOE delegates were treated to a very warm welcome. 200 ICOE delegates passing through the small town of Parrsboro caused quite a stir, with the local legion putting on a hearty lunch prior to a walking tour of the main street where many local shopkeepers had erected signs welcoming ICOE to the town. Read all about it in the local news article: The world comes to Parrsboro.

Following that we had an interesting tour around FORCE’s substation, noting the similarities and differences with our own tidal substation based on the island of Eday, in Orkney. After that it was on to the FORCE visitor centre, which attracts over 5000 visitors a year, with a beautiful view over the Minas Passage in the Bay of Fundy where they’ve just laid four cables for their tidal test site.

After a very enjoyable day it was time for some hard work – the conference kicked off with a powerful keynote speech from Alan Moore OBE of Renewable UK. For anyone who missed that, it’s available to read on the EMEC blog: Guest blog by Alan Moore OBE: Ocean energy – why aren’t we doing it already?

EMEC exhibited as part of the Scotland pavilion alongside many of our industry colleagues, and it was great to see networking taking place between the Scottish contingent and our counterparts on the other side of ‘the pond’. Oliver Wragg (EMEC Commercial Director) presented EMEC’s Integrated Environmental Monitoring Platform providing an overview of all the different data streams that EMEC collects, and Neil Kermode (EMEC Managing Director) spoke alongside global test centre colleagues in the ‘Industry Development Centres’ session emphasising the need for a uniformed approach among marine energy test centres. Both sessions were very well attended.

Finally, on Friday, EMEC jointly hosted a workshop with FORCE, bringing together operational and planned test sites from around the world to facilitate discussions on areas of common interest. The main conclusions from that were that coordination in procedures and standards to ensure consistency in testing marine energy converters across the globe was essential to help support the development of a global industry. The full press release is available to read here: Coordination and knowledge sharing key for global ocean energy test sites

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