[2] Ownership transferred to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) on 1 January 2012 in advance of the abolition of SWRDA on 31 March 2012.

The Seatricity device does not produce electricity directly, but is designed to pump water under pressure several miles along a pipeline back to the shore to drive a turbine.

Over a three-year period, Seatricity's device was deployed for three separate summer trial windows – each funded entirely by the company's investors and contracted for on Wave Hub Ltd's commercial leasehold terms.

Wave Hub Ltd ostensibly attributed the limitation of Seatricity's length of tenure, in part, to the maximum tenure granted by the Marine Management Organisation (MMO) site license, which the MMO attributed to the length of lease the Crown Estate would grant to Seatricity; as advised by their specialist advisers, Wave Hub Ltd.

This cyclic uncertainty was exacerbated repeatedly by Wave Hub Ltd's pressure on Seatricity to vacate their allocated site at the end of each successive trial period because the location was 'needed for other clients' (who, of course, ultimately never materialised).

During each trial the company accumulated data on the promising potential and pressures achieved by their pumping system, but it was never connected to the shore; and nor could it have been from a site so far offshore.

Trials were brought to an abrupt halt when the tether broke in 11m waves on a par with those experienced during winter storms during a summer gale on the night of 19 Aug 2016, close to the end of Seatricity's final licence period.

The final irony came when later research and RoV site inspection showed that a combination of the swell pattern and the Wave Hub sites circular tidal cycle had 'wound up' the secondary reserve safety moorings around the Oceanus 2 device's main tether in the style of a Spanish windlass – thereby putting each under enormous loads and leading to their eventual failure.

Without the complexity and subsequent interaction of the risk averse Wave Hub Ltd's mandated and superfluous secondary moorings, the device and its tether would have survived and operated unscathed.