College Of The North Atlantic’s Wave Environment Research Centre Opens Up New Opportunities
Aquaculture is an important economic opportunity for Newfoundland and the College of the North Atlantic’s Wave Environment Research Centre (CNA WERC) in Lord’s Cove offers a number of opportunities with their work and research for the region.
Dr. Michael Graham, director of WERC and his team, with the support from Springboard’s Innovation Mobilization Fund for Marketing Support have significantly advanced the work in the use of ocean wave energy to supply sea water to land-based aquaculture via a pump that they developed. He also said that the project successfully developed a test facility to house the equipment needed to carry out the project’s other objectives that developed over time.
However, what no one could foresee were the other opportunities that opened up unintentionally – the centre has become a major tourist attraction for Lord’s Cove. WERC is now working with the town to develop the centres tourist potential and will provide further employment so the researchers can focus on their work.
A number of other projects are underway and in one of them, the centre collects information valuable to business, including six years of weather data, and has the infrastructure in place such as mooring sites with anchors, and access to labs and workshops at the CNA campus in Burin.
Besides further projects in various stages of planning, WERC also offers possibilities for entrepreneurs and talks are underway with Memorial University’s Centre for Social Enterprise to explore options.
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Photo by Bailey Mahon on Unsplash