Wave and tidal devices hit milestones at Orkney testing centre

The Orkney-based European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) continues to aid the development and commercialisation of a series of technologies, including three energy conversion devices designed to extract and process energy from both tides and waves. 

First, what is said to be the world’s most powerful tidal turbine, developed and manufactured by Scotrenewables Tidal Power, has reached full rated power. After undergoing grid-connected commissioning works prior to Christmas last year, the SR2000 was re-connected to its subsea cable in a low-cost connection operation that took under an hour, says EMEC. 

Following energisation, the 500-tonne floating tidal turbine commenced generation and power export to the local Orkney grid. Since then the turbine has been undergoing a phased testing programme leading to full 2 MW rated export capacity.

Scotrenewables CEO Andrew Scott said: ‘We are tremendously excited to have the SR2000 demonstrating the performance and cost advantages of our floating tidal technology, in line with forecasts, whilst delivering new benchmarks within the tidal sector. This performance resets the bar for the costs of delivering tidal power.’

The deployment is already feeding into design optimisations being made under the company’s commercialisation project, FloTEC, which should see an even lower-cost SR2000 model rolled out as a commercial offering in 2018, says the company. 

Meanwhile, Wello’s Penguin wave energy converter has successfully generated electricity into the national grid off the coast of Orkney. The Penguin was installed at EMEC’s grid-connected wave test site at Billia Croo at the beginning of March by Orkney-based Green Marine.

This is the first of three wave energy converters due to be installed at EMEC over the next three years as part of the CEFOW (Clean Energy from Ocean Waves) project, funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The CEFOW project aims to ready the Penguin technology for commercialisation by developing the first grid-connected wave energy array in the UK, focusing on lowering the levelised cost of energy.

Last, technology company EC-OG switched on its Subsea Power Hub for the first time in April. The ocean current energy conversion system, a subsea hybrid drive system that uses a combination of a marine energy convertor coupled to a lithium-based energy storage system, is also being tested at EMEC. The next step is to leave the device running 100% autonomously with wireless data monitoring over the summer months.