Background

Incubating innovation

The story of SABELLA began with HYDROHELIX ENERGIES, an engineering firm based in Quimper and created in 2000, committed to developing a solution for the utilisation of hydraulic currents. Having patented a turbine designed to capture the energy from tidal currents, HYDROHELIX aimed to further this concept through an initial series of studies and basin trials. In order to carry out this project, HYDROHELIX rapidly chose to collaborate with experts in complementary activities.

Thus in 2004, a consortium of local industrial stakeholders backed the start-up to support it in the continuation of its innovation initiative.

Within the trend of business clusters, this partnership was formalised in 2005, under the name MARENERGIE Consortium, to submit a project of the same name to the Brittany Maritime Cluster.

The same year, the MARENERGIE project was accredited. Despite this territorial recognition, the project was unable to the find public funding needed to get it off the ground.

Faced with a problem of energy dependency and conscious of the resource present on its shoreline, the Region of Brittany called upon MARENERGIE Consortium in late 2006 to give a demonstration of its technology.

Consequently, in mid-2007, the Region of Brittany, having federated the local government bodies and the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME), decided to finance 40% of experimental project “SABELLA D03”.

With this support secured, the partnership, renamed SABELLA Consortium, developed a pilot turbine and achieved a national first by immersing the first French submarine tidal stream turbine on 2 April 2008.

On the strength of the results of in situ trials validating the capture model and the merit of the technology, the Consortium decided to pursue the industrial extension of the adventure and hence created the company SABELLA SAS in November 2008.