Today is really the fruition of four years effort by a number of people. The combined force of UWA, its Oceans Institute and the director of the centre here has come to fruition in the form of what I think is the only substantial wave energy generator in Australian waters at the moment.

What you see behind me is a wave energy converter. It is a device that transforms the kinetic energy in the wave into electricity. This is what we call the M4 Albany Wave Energy Project. 

To demonstrate the potential of wave energy in Australia to decarbonise the Australian economy. So M4 has always been a very exciting project because there are so many good things about it. 

It's the only Australian wave energy project through the scale. It's the only project that makes data publicly available. It's been very exciting talking to the local community about it, to really empower them as part of this project, make them proud of what is happening here.

The Great Southern generally is a very proud region. They long to have more clean energy solutions and this gives them a tool for that. 

So how does it work? 

You can see it, it's actually two parts. We've got a back floater on my left and a front floater on my back. And the device is actually flexing with the wave.

It has exactly one wavelength. 

So when the back and the front floater are at the crest of the wave, the centre is at the trough, and that rotational movement is transformed into electricity for a generator that displays. And the electricity we actually capture and measure, and so from that we can understand how much energy we can generate.

Based on the wave resources that we've got here, Albany has a couple of advantages. 

One is obviously it is the location of UWA'S regional campus, and that gives you a better social license to operate where you're already known to the community.

Albany also has an internationally unparalleled wave resource. So in recent work that has been done by our group at the University of Western Australia, we have demonstrated that wave energy can be a fundamental enabler to offerable energy resources, including wind and solar, because it does provide energy when wind and solar wouldn't.

A big focus of our project was to demonstrate the capability of the local supply chain in undertaking a very complex ocean engineering project. 

So 80% in dollar value of the whole project has been undertaken locally in collaboration with SMC, our head contractors and six other local contractors here in Albany.

For me, as an Albany local, it is very exciting. This project is once in a lifetime cutting edge research that you wouldn't normally get to do in a construction company. 

Nearly all of the resources and all of the subcontractors that were used to build this are local within a 10 kilometre radius of the site where we are now.

And there's a lot of contractors that use the opportunity to upskill their employees. And so for example, the welding that was done. It's from people that weld sheds normally who would qualify against welding procedures. We went through the whole weld testing procedures with them to be at at an oil and gas standard.

Basically. Albany used to be Australia's capital for energy through whaling and whale oil.

Now the last whaling station to close in Australia in the late seventies, and we're trying to pick up that superlative Albany as Australia's energy capital, now being the site of a renewable energy clean innovation.

It has effectively been six and a half years in the making of bringing a wave energy project to Albany, and to the regional campus of UWA. 

And today as we hooked up the wave energy converter to the mooring buoy, the sea triall begins, and it will be an exciting six months of data collection. 

It's fantastic to see the four devices be deployed. It's an opportunity to really explore what is the potential, bringing a different mix of energy into the renewable energy mix that's critical for Australia's future. 

I think a lot of credit is due to the Oceans Institute and VCA for their persistence in getting and deploying this particular piece of technology.