Norwegian wave developer AW Energy is to commence with its technology demonstration project in Portugal at the beginning of October this year.

In an interview with New Energy Finance, CEO of AW-Energy John Liljelund said that preparations for the project began last year and that the goal of the demonstration is to ‘manufacture and deploy the first grid-connected WaveRoller unit. A one-year test period is included in the project and the nominal capacity of the demo unit is around 300kW HP laptop battery‘.

Deployment of the device will be in the summer of 2011, and the project will then run until the end of 2012. The company expects to launch its first commercial-scale device ‘around 2013′.

Liljelund said that the demonstration unit is ‘very similar to the future commercial scale unit which will have a nominal capacity of around 1.2-1.8MW IBM laptop battery, depending on the resource at the future installation sites’.

Regarding funding, the company have raised ‘considerably less that EUR 5 million ($7.3 million) and kept the ‘burn’ tightly in our control’. Liljelund believes that the commercial scale device can be achieved with ‘around EUR 20 million ($29 million) investments Sony laptop battery , excluding the possible investments to the pre-commercial site’.

AW has so far had two 10kW prototypes installed in ‘real sea environments’ in Portugal, the most recent being in 2008.

In October 2007 the developer scooped more than EUR 1 million ($ 1.45 million) in venture capital investment from Fortum for Laptop battery, the electricity group also based in Norway. In return, Fortum received an 8.4% stake in AW.

AW is developing its WaveRoller device which oscillates on the bottom of the ocean rather than using surface waves.