Equinox Ocean Turbines (EQOT) begins open-water testing of its Mobula®5 1:10 prototype in Friesland, the Netherlands, on 11-16 July. The milestone is designed to de-risk the technology and advance ocean current energy capture toward commercial deployment, while supporting EQOT’s current fundraising round.
The technology testing is expected to advance it to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6, demonstrating system performance in real-world ocean conditions and validating key assumptions required for commercial-scale deployment. The data collected will support the next major development milestone: a half-scale product demonstrator targeted for 2028.
EQOT is initially targeting high-resource markets in Japan, South Africa, and the United States. The initial addressable market represents approximately 30 GW within a global ocean current resource potential of more than 700 GW.
“Beginning open-water testing of Mobula® 5 is a defining milestone for EQOT,” said Pieter de Haas, CEO and CTO at EQOT. “Years of engineering, modelling, and development are now being validated in real ocean conditions. The results will provide critical data to support the next phase of development and accelerate our pathway toward commercial deployment.”
The Mobula® 5 testing programme is designed to validate the operational and technical requirements, including:
- Operational behaviour and full turbine controllability, moving beyond digital models to real-world performance
- Energy production capability in line with predictions, generating power curves and production statistics that validate the technology claims
- Hybrid simulation, connecting EQOT’s OpenFAST simulation programme directly to the turbine’s control system, advancing testing capabilities beyond conventional approaches
Following the initial validation, EQOT is advancing commercial deployment pathways in the Florida and Kuroshio currents, two of the world’s most powerful ocean current resources. Through collaborations focused on environmental assessment, permitting, and project development, the company is preparing the foundations for both demonstration-scale projects and future utility-scale deployments.
“At InnoEnergy, we support technologies that have the potential to create entirely new clean energy industries while strengthening economic competitiveness, resilience, and strategic autonomy,” said Jacob Ruiter, CEO Benelux and UK at InnoEnergy. “Ocean current energy represents a significant untapped opportunity. The start of open-water testing for our portfolio company, EQOT, marks an important step in reducing technology risk and advancing toward commercial deployment of a predictable, continuous source of renewable power.”
As electricity systems require increasing volumes of reliable carbon-free power, ocean currents offer a unique combination of predictability, energy density, and continuous generation. Unlike intermittent renewable technologies, ocean currents flow 24 hours a day, creating the potential for a new category of renewable baseload energy.
