Doesn’t anyone remember LIMPET? Agucadoura?

Despite what you might have read, the Carnegie Wave Energy project at Garden Island, off Perth, Australia, is not the world’s first grid-connected wave power station, nor the first grid-connected wave power array.

The 500-kilowatt-rated LIMPET – that’s Land Installed Marine Power Energy Transmitter – commissioned in spring 2001 on the Isle of Islay off the west coast of Scotland, deserves the first-station honor (although some might argue for the earlier, 75-kilowatt prototype that operated between 1991 and 2000; puny though its output was, the thing was apparently grid-connected). LIMPET has been forgotten, evidently, but it was actually only in 2013 that owner Voith determined “there is no completive environment for energy from wave power stations,” and then shuttered the plant.

The Agucadoura Wave Park was far shorter-lived, lasting only a few months, but it consisted of three 750-kilowatt Pelamis attenuators, those gigantic, red, segmented, snaky devices, qualifying it as an array.

So there.

An accurate historical record is important, but there’s a larger point to be made here: While any wave energy converter getting wet is a welcome step, what the industry most needs – solid evidence that the technology has found its course, with reliable systems that can work as promised and deliver energy at a reasonable cost – has, as far as we know, no more been delivered at Garden Island than it was at Islay or Agucadoura.

With Australia’s support, Carnegie has pulled together enough money to do an array, but so had Pelamis back in 2008; we need to see Carnegie’s CETO 5 system perform well over a long stretch in the water before heralding it as an advance for wave energy. And remember, Carnegie has said its next-generation device – CETO 6 – will produce electricity onboard and wire it ashore. This is a fundamental shift from CETO 5’s onshore energy-generation system, clouding the value of the Garden Island project as a model.

The more important development in wave energy so far in 2015 could be Scotland’s new Wave Energy Scotland (WES) body. Instead of spending scant resources on wave energy companies to get possibly not-really-there-yet devices in the water, with ultimately little to show for the effort, funding will go toward making technological progress in specific areas. Crucially, WES is looking for contributions from outside the wave energy industry. As Scottish Energy Minister Fergus Ewing put it in February when he announced WES would have £14 million ($20.85 million) to offer over a 13-month period:

“We have adopted a completely new approach to funding the sector. It is one that will foster collaborative research and development and will encourage technology developers to work with large engineering companies, academics and each other to address shared challenges.”

Later, WES revealed that about half of that initial funding would go to developers of power take-off (PTO) systems “who require investment to advance their technology through rigorous testing and, in time, towards commercialization.” WES said it would award contracts ranging from £100,000 to £4 million to the best proposals submitted by May 22, with contracts going out by the end of June.

The emphasis on PTOs makes sense; there are a wide range of device designs for capturing the energy in waves, but all of them must convert that highly variable energy into a smooth flow of electricity. WES is looking for advances that might yield a standardized PTO that is reliable, within cost boundaries and survivable, and can more or less fit in a range of device types. Conquer the PTO challenge for everyone, the thinking seems to be, and then devices can move forward to real proof-of-concept testing.

“The PTO system competitive call is the first of five calls to be run over the next year, with support from the Carbon Trust, the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult and the University of Edinburgh,” WES said. “Wave Energy Scotland’s objective is to put wave energy technology developed in Scotland on the path towards a reliable, commercial product that generates electricity at no more than £150/MWh.”