The Meeting Point for the World’s Leading Marine Energy Test Centres

Open-sea test centres are at the heart of the emerging wave and tidal industry.

They help develop the sector in many ways: by reducing costs and streamlining test programmes for technology developers; they are often the first to encounter regulatory barriers like permitting; they provide a focal point to grow a supply chain around; and they are a key node for knowledge sharing.

EMEC established the International WaTERS (Wave and Tidal Energy Research Sites) network during EMEC’s International Test Centre Symposium in Orkney in 2013. The International WaTERS network brings together operational and planned test sites from around the world to discuss common issues and agree actions for collaborating for the good of marine energy.

Its objectives are:

Share updates on progress and challenges;
Identify common test site challenges and opportunities;
Discuss key R&D topics;
Identify actions to forge relationships and knowledge transfer between test sites.

Today the network includes open-sea test centres from 20 countries, and over 30 test and research centres. It meets once per year with the purpose of driving collaboration and knowledge transfer between test centres and global regions.

Attendees learn directly from their peers about managing test sites to a high standard, and facilitating and delivering high-quality research and demonstration programmes. Meetings have proven to generate collaborative research projects, and tangible knowledge exchange between test sites.

The most recent meeting was co-hosted by EMEC and National Taiwan Ocean University (NTOU) at Keelung, Taiwan in September 2018 with the support of the IEA-OES programme.