A groundbreaking renewable energy project off the Cornish coastline has been hit by further setbacks, engineers confirmed last night.

The Western Morning News reported yesterday how the latest stage of the multimillion-pound Wave Hub project was entering completion, with a special cable being brought ashore enabling connectivity to the National Grid.

However, the project, which has been fraught with delays since the hub arrived in Hayle's waters earlier this month, has again hit a snag after engineers were forced to come up with a new solution to floating the projects subsea cable. Contractors CTC Marine said their chosen flotation system had not performed as expected after sections of the cable risked sinking for a second time on Thursday night. Efforts to bring the cable ashore have been hampered by technical difficulties since last week. At the weekend around 600m of cable sank when part of the flotation system failed.

A project spokesman described the latest setback as "frustrating", but stressed the delays would have no impact on Wave Hub's overall timetable, with the first wave device developer expected to deploy at the site in 2011.