It’s been a long, hard winter for wave energy, with reports of failure and retrenchment streaming out of Europe. But, hey, it’s still summer Down Under, and Australia has delivered a rare sunny wave story.

The question is whether the Carnegie Wave Energy system near Perth – it officially began piping energy to the grid last week – will serve as a springboard for future growth, or if it will become another symbol of wave energy’s struggle to move beyond science-project status.

CEO Michael Ottaviano called the Perth project “the only operating wave power station in the world,” which it is, but a little over six years ago that was a claim the Scottish company Pelamis Wave Power could make about its Agucadoura deployment in Portugal. It only lasted a few months.

And even as Carnegie puts its CETO 5 system to the test off Garden Island, work on a next-generation system is well under way. CETO 6 is so fundamentally different, it’s enough to make you wonder why the company bothered spending A$32 million to do the quite modestly sized 720-kilowatt CETO 5 project – but that’s a dilemma wave developers always face with their nascent technologies.

CETO 5 and CETO 6 do have a point in common: They both use submerged buoys – “buoyant actuators” in the argot – that drive pumps. Being submerged protects the seascape and keeps the actuators from the most violent ocean action, but a tradeoff is less energetic water.

With CETO 5, the actuators are tethered to pumps on the seabed. As the actuators move up and down in the passing waves, the pumps send high-pressure water through a pipe to an onshore power station where generators produce electricity.

Making the power onshore was always sold as a virtue; the actuator would be simpler than wave devices that integrate power production onboard, the power output would be smoother, and the energy could even be stored to some extent. Another advantage: the possibility of using the pressurized water to do reverse-osmosis desalination, something Carnegie says it is integrating into the Perth project. Aquamarine Power in Scotland and Resolute Marine Energy in the U.S. likewise have tried going in the same direction (although with flapped devices to capture the wave’s energy).

But the many drawbacks of building and maintaining onshore-generation are evident in the rationale Carnegie gives for CETO 6, which won’t send water ashore and instead will produce electricity at the buoy and deliver it shoreside via cable.

Locating the power generation within the buoy removes the need to attach pumps, accumulators and other hydraulic components to the seabed, removing the requirement for offshore heavy lift vessel capacity. This also reduces offshore installation and maintenance time and cost. The demonstration of CETO incorporating subsea generation and transmission of electrical power will allow Carnegie to take advantage of deeper, more distant to shore wave resources and will significantly increase the size of the commercial market for CETO.

The CETO 5 system consists of three 240-kilowatt units (the energy it produces is sold at an undisclosed price to a military base on Garden Island). The system was built with A$13 million in assistance from the government’s Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). Ottaviano says Carnegie needs to scale up its system in order to become economical, and the company has apparently concluded that wasn’t going to happen with onshore power generation.

The “buoyant actuators” that are 11 meters in diameter for CETO 5 will be 20 meters in diameter for CETO 6, increasing generating capability to 1 MW apiece, Carnegie says. The plan is to deploy the CETO 6 system offshore from Garden Island, as with CETO 5, but about 11 kilometers out at sea instead of 3 kilometers, in deeper waters said to be three times more energetic.

Two days after cutting the ribbon on CETO 5, Carnegie said it had closed $20 million in financing for CETO 6 through the government-backed Clean Energy Finance Corporation. ARENA is chipping in with an $11 million grant.