Protean managing director told Bruce Lane told Energy News that Protean, the brainchild of Sean Moore, had suffered a tough few years, having tried to go public just as the global financial crisis was breaking.

Needless to say that attempt at an IPO was scuppered, so today's backdoor listing on the Australian Securities Exchange is the culmination of years of work.

Unfortunately for the company its shares have dropped 25% to $0.018, from $0.024 in early trade this morning.

Stonehenge, previously a Korea-focused minerals explorer, entered the picture in August 2014, agreeing to acquire the Protean Wave Energy Converter technology under a two-year option deal with Moore, paying $500,000 over 18 months to advance the process' development.

Stonehenge pressed the button on its late option last year, and sold off a 50% interest in its subsidiary to Korean-public company Korea Resources Investment & Development for shares to pave the way for its rebirth as a clean energy company.

KORID is now driving assessment of the Daejon vanadium and uranium exploration projects in South Korea, with Protean's immediate exposure likely to be just $300,000 over the next two years.

That funding will come from the $2.5 million recently raised from equity markets, while most of the funds will go into further developing the Protean Wave Energy Convertor.

Protean's first step as a public company will completing of the fabrication of its first pilot wave project at Bunbury, south of Perth in Western Australia.

Over the coming weeks it will install one 30-unit array that should be capable of generating some 45,000 watts.

"I'd like to say we'll get into the water during March, but it will certainly be the early part of this year," Lane told Energy News.

Lane compares the company's Protean technology to a household solar panel array, or utility scale solar farm because the various buoys are placed together in an array over a small area on the ocean floor.

The lightweight buoys are lashed together onshore, towed to the desired location and placed in the water.

"We have ballast on the sea floor, but it is not fixed and we do not drill into the sea floor," Lane said.

"There is sufficient weight to hold it in place and establish buoyancy on top, and then the systems moves dynamically, and generates energy in all six degrees of wave movement."

The company describes Protean as a "point-absorber wave energy converter buoy device" that floats at the water surface and extracts energy from the waves by the extension and retraction of a tether to its anchoring weight on the sea bed.

The device is unique in that it optimises the conversion of energy from waves through all or motion.

The Protean system has been trialled at a 1.5m wide sale in the sea off Perth, proving the system can successfully convert the power from waves into usable energy using compressed air.

From that point, the generation is relatively simple.

"Once we have the compressed air and the convertor working we should have a lot of data after a very short time, and that will allow us to refine what we are working with," Lane said.

The wave converter uses compact architecture to produce power very efficiently from a small, low cost design targeted at keeping the projected levelled cost of energy down.

It can be scaled up with multiple arrays, and they are hot swappable if repaired are needed.

The plan is to scale up the system using "off the shelf" components, using a ‘design one, build many' approach, although each wave farm will have some differences at the design stage to take into account the different aspects of any site.

Lane hopes that, in the same way solar has become hugely popular, the lightweight Protean system will also see rapid take-up.

If the Bunbury wave farm is successful the next step will be to sell the solution globally, with the company is focused on the island nations of the Pacific, with a larger pilot being considered for the Maldives' Hanimaadhoo Island.

A site will be selected close to shore on the windward part of the island, where the population is minimal, and where the sea states are sufficient to generate power.

Installation of the Protean system will potentially close off some areas from fishing and other uses, with the Protean will peak a few centimetres above the water, but Lane believes there are plenty of places where wave energy converters can be set up, assuming there is proper community engagement.

"There are a lot of places off the coast where there is limited use, and those would be ideal," he said.

The company ultimately hopes to demonstrate that Protean wave farms can be easily deployed in the ocean, close to shore, at relatively low cost and with minimal disruption to the environment.

Protean has also teamed up with Californian Polytechnic University to assess the potential for renewable energy in California, a state with a mandate for 50% renewables, but no wave generation at all.

A demonstration buoy is planned at CalPoly's 1km-long, state of the art, marine research pier before potentially scaling up the operation to become a supplier to the pier in San Luis Bay.

Protean also has a memorandum of understanding with the Yanchep Beach Joint Venture for the possible development of a wave farm off the coastal community of Two Rocks, Western Australia, where there is a potential wave energy resource of 20 megawatts over just 1 km of breakwater.