Ireland has been steering through some extremely tough economic seas recently. But it is in the seas beyond its shores that it has made some excellent investments in terms of renewable energy. With some of the strongest wave power potential in the world Ireland is pumping more and more money into its wave energy sector.

But Irish companies aren’t the only ones getting in on the ocean action. One Maryland-based clean energy start-up already has a lead on the US competition, as it develops power generation technology tested in the choppy waters off the Emerald Isle’s western coast.
Wave Energy Conversion Corporation of Ireland (WECCI) CEO Brian Cunningham hopes to use production and testing facilities near Galway to further prove the Wave Energy Conversion System’s capability after several years of trials in the Atlantic.

Cunningham has great respect for the waves–having more than 1,000 dives under his belt as a submariner in the U.S. Navy and later experience as a naval ordinance and NASA physicist. He also holds a passion for spreading good ideas through entrepreneurship, which he himself did with two successful technology companies.

In addition to his naval experience, Cunningham brought Computer Entry Systems from himself to 1,000 Associates to achieve an IPO and an 8 year run on the NASDAQ. That led to a lucrative buyout (returning an average of 34X to founding CES shareholders) by another public company.
Before that, he helped jumpstart the national market for computer peripheral devices (many of which, like mini computers, magnetic tape storage, high speed line printers and high speed modems became essentials to the IT revolution) with colleagues from NASA.

WECCI has already secured a letter of intent (LOI) from Energia, Ireland’s largest independent electricity supplier, to buy all of the wave energy generated power that its Amplified Wave Energy Converter can produce. In that power purchase agreement (PPA) scenario, Energia would pay WECCI €220 ($308) per megawatt-hour for electricity that the company expects it can produce for €50 ($67)/MWh.

“Simple and robust engineering is key,” Cunningham says, emphasizing that the articulated barge design of the Wave Energy Converter–first developed in Ireland by WECCI’s Chief Technology Consultant Dr. Michael McCormick–is right on the money. Already a seasoned entrepreneur, CEO Cunningham decided to come out of retirement to meet the challenge of soaring world energy demand while tapping into a sharp rise in money rushing into the wave energy sector.

On November 10, the European Union’s executive branch announced a trillion-euro energy investment strategy for the next decade.
European Energy Commissioner Gunther Oettinger said, “Looking at our networks for gas, oil and electricity, we are still stuck within the borders of 19th-century principalities… We don’t have the quality or the capacity compared to goods and services.”

Even before that announcement, wave energy investment activity in Ireland alone has been increasing at a furious pace. To meet the country’s goal of drawing 40% of national electricity supplies from renewables by 2020–that’s double the European Union’s “20 by 20” target–Irish utilities are putting millions of Euros down on companies like WECCI.

In early November, major gas utility Bord Gais Eireann acquired a 20% stake in Tonn Energy, a joint venture between Sweden’s Vattenfall (the #5 power utility in Europe) and Irish wave energy company Wavebob.
Bord Gais CEO John Mullins put his country’s political and industrial commitment to wave energy in very certain terms: “The potential of the Irish wave energy resource is enormous and Irish utilities are determined to capitalize on that.”

The global investment increase in wave energy echoes Ireland’s determination. In all of 2009, $13,679,360 was invested in wave energy companies. In just the first quarter of 2010, that amount increased to $22,684,000.
That’s a 64% increase in the first three months of 2010 over the full twelve months of 2009!
And on November 8, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu visited the headquarters of Wavebob, which has offices in Annapolis, Maryland, and which received $2.3 million from the Department of Energy to support its US-based R&D. In WECCI, we see an American business venturing across the ocean to brave the rougher Irish waters.

The numbers aren’t in for FY 2010 yet, but you can bet that wave energy will be one of the hottest sectors to watch in 2011.