Off-Grid Market Opportunities for Wave Power Technology

Abstract: The long-term objective within the wave energy industry is to deliver large-scale wave energy farms connected to large national power grids. However, this objective cannot be reached with today’s wave energy technologies at their current maturity levels. This has created a need within the industry to identify alternative development paths—in this thesis referred to as off-grid market opportunities—that will generate revenue along the way, thus enabling R&D efforts to be financed by revenue rather than external investments. The purpose of this research has been to investigate the intersection between the off-grid market and wave power technology, and to analyze and evaluate the attractiveness of the identified market opportunities. The project has been configured as a qualitative, exploratory case study using the case of CorPower Ocean and their wave energy converter technology as the point of reference. A strong market perspective has permeated the entire study and technical aspects has only been considered to a limited extent. The research resulted in that eight distinct market segments were identified: ancillary, defense and security, direct to product, leisure and recreational, ocean observing and measurement, portable generation equipment, power grids, and various applications. Each segment was evaluated based on four different aspects: size and growth, structural attractiveness, alignment with internal resources and capabilities, and alignment with internal objectives. This resulted in that the ancillary, direct to product, and power grid segments were considered to be the most promising and two sub-segments within the power grid segment, i.e. micro grids and resorts, were chosen for an in-depth analysis. This analysis confirmed that the micro grid and resort sub-segments do represent several attractive and viable off-grid market opportunities for CorPower Ocean. Consequently, two ideal market scenarios were presented to be used as guidelines during early stages of market introduction. Additionally, a step-based approach for opportunity assessment was developed and used to structure the in-depth analysis. This approach was found to be very effective for the specific purposes of this research, but it is also considered to have universal applicability and it is recommended that it should be further tested and evaluated in future research.