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Ocean Energy Europe appoints Pablo Ruiz-Minguela as board member

30 April 2021
Pablo Ruiz Minguela

Innovation, complementarity of stakeholders and industrial convergence between different technologies are key to competitiveness and the deployment of the sector.

Pablo Ruiz-Minguela, Head of Wave Energy at TECNALIA, has joined the new Board of Directors of Ocean Energy Europe – OEE for the next three years. The OEE is the largest network of ocean energy professionals in the world, with 120 member organisations.

Pablo, together with Francisco García Lorenzo, CEO at APPA Marina and at Wedge Global Spain, strengthens the presence of Spain in the decision-making forums regarding ocean renewable energy, which is still in the research and development phase but has set the ambitious and growing goal of producing 100 MW by 2025, 3 GW by 2030 and 40 GW by 2050. In the current economic and health crisis, more than 45 million euros have been pumped into ocean energy.

“The Strategic Agenda published in 2020 by European platform ETIP Ocean includes specific actions to be carried out by 2025 in order to address the most pressing technological challenges,” explained Pablo Ruiz Minguela. These challenges include the development of devices to harness wave and tidal energy, but there are also other challenges regarding materials, foundations, connections, anchoring, operations logistics, integration into energy systems, data collection and analysis, and modelling and simulation tools.

Francisco García Lorenzo declared that the sector is strong as there is the wide range of organisations working in it: “APPA Marina will continue to work to ensure that the complementarity of stakeholders and industrial convergence between different technologies help to create a distributed, solid and competitive value chain, to help the sector take off.

These appointments come at a key moment for the ocean energy sector: sector is being scaled up and becoming industrialised, and the shift towards a decarbonised energy system is getting closer. The co-chairmen will lead the way in the sector over the next few years, in order to place ocean energy in a key position in the energy transition.

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