Round’s previous roles include finance director of Cambrian Mining and Anglo Asian Mining, where he continues to sit on the board as a non-executive director and chairman of the Audit Committee. He also spent a number of years with oilfield logistics group Consolidated Supply Management and the Scottish Resources Group. At Aquamarine, Round will play an important role in raising the funding needed to commercialize its technology.

To that end the company had another success to announce. Aquamarine Power has secured €5.8 million of public funding to support the manufacture of its second-generation wave energy device, Oyster 2. The device will be manufactured later this year for testing at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney (EMEC) in 2011. The grant was received from the Marine Renewables Proving Fund (MRPF), a £22 million initiative funded by the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and managed by the Carbon Trust.

Aquamarine’s Oyster wave energy converter saw its first full-scale 315kW device launched in Orkney in November last year, when it began producing power to UK’s National Grid for the first time. The company is now developing the Oyster 2 device which will consist of a 2.5MW ‘pod’ of three linked wave energy devices powering a single onshore hydro-electric generator. A commercial farm of 20 Oyster devices will provide enough energy to power 9,000 three bedroom family homes. Aquamarine Power plans to deploy its first commercial Oyster devices in 2013.