Engineering news
Marine energy company Aquamarine Power has appointed Dr Paddy O’Kane as chief executive, replacing interim CEO John Malcolm who has stepped down after six months.
O’Kane has been Aquamarine Power’s chief technical officer since 2010. Prior to this he was head of engineering and wind resource assessment at SSE Renewables, with responsibility for the technical design and specification of almost £3 billion of renewable projects.
He started his career at Du Pont and has held a number of senior engineering and consultancy posts. He is a chartered engineer and a member of the Institute of Engineers of Ireland.
The company's chairman Paul Capell said: “Paddy combines a tremendous track record of academic and technical expertise with real experience of the challenges in making full-scale machines and sub-systems which can work and survive in all sea conditions.
“This experience, together with Paddy’s proven leadership qualities, will be a superb asset for Aquamarine Power and the industry more generally as it continues to evolve.”
Aquamarine Power was founded in 2005 to commercialise a wave energy converter known as the Oyster. The journey to commercialisation has proved more difficult than expected, and at the end of last year the Edinburgh-based company said that after a strategic review it was to significantly downsize, cutting its workforce from 50 to 20.
O’Kane, who is a board member of the Brussels-based trade body Ocean Energy Europe, is confident for the future: “We are now focused on improving the reliability and cost of the Oyster system. This involves the development of the next-generation Oyster and critical sub-systems, with a major focus on WavePOD, a pan-industry power take off system we are developing in conjunction with Bosch Rexroth, Carnegie Wave Energy and others.
“We believe WavePOD offers an opportunity for the whole industry to get behind an enabling technology which has potential to radically improve reliability and deliver long term reductions in the cost of wave energy. We have now completed the first phase of onshore laboratory testing where the WavePOD test unit has performed flawlessly.
“The industry now has a very clear understanding of the scale of challenge and opportunity in extracting energy from waves, and policy-makers recognise the need for a long-term collaborative approach which pools expertise and scarce funding from across Europe in order to overcome shared technical obstacles.”