The UK division of the Fluor Corporation, Fluor Limited, and Airtricity, the ren ...

The UK division of the Fluor Corporation, Fluor Limited, and Airtricity, the renewable energy division of Scottish and Southern Energy, have been granted an exclusivity award by The Crown Estate to develop an offshore wind farm at Bell Rock off Scotland’s Angus coastline. During the next year Fluor and Airtricity will work with a variety of local authorities, statutory and non-statutory entities and other stakeholders in order to undertake site specific consultations and environmental impact assessments before bringing forward a final plan for development of the site. The proposed wind farm could have a total capacity of up to 700 MW. The site is 10 km from the Angus coastline and covers around 93 km2. Airtricity has also signed a development agreement with Aquamarine Power aimed at developing sites capable of hosting 1,000 MW of marine energy by 2020. Under the Agreement, the two companies will enter into a 50:50 joint venture to develop wave and tidal energy sites in the UK and Republic of Ireland. Work on the development of the first two sites has already started, with plans to roll out further sites over the next three years. Aquamarine has developed unique tools to identify and evaluate marine energy sites across the world. Using its in-house model of tidal and wave power resources around the coasts of UK and Ireland, the company says it has identified several GW of promising sites. The two companies’ goal is to deliver marine energy sites suitable for deploying Aquamarine’s wave and tidal technologies, including the Oyster Wave Energy Converter and the Neptune Tidal Device. Aquamarine is simultaneously pursuing a similar contract for developments in Southern Europe. Finally, electricity utility E.ON has announced that it will shortly be generating electricity from the waves - as part of the company’s staged approach towards developing the potential of marine energy, E.ON will buy, install and test a wave power device in UK waters. The initial test programme will be based around a single 750 kW Pelamis P2 device that is currently being built in Edinburgh, and which will be installed and tested at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney. E.ON will become the first utility to test a marine energy device at EMEC, which is the only grid connected marine test facility in Europe The Pelamis device is expected to become fully operational in 2010. The first year of testing will be an extended commissioning period, with the next two years designed to improve the device’s working capabilities Amaan Lafayette, Marine Development Manager at E.ON, said: ‘It’s only by actually getting devices in the water that we can test the potential for wave power in the UK, which is why this is such an important step.’ This is the first time the Pelamis P2 device will have been tested anywhere in the world. The new device will be 180 m long, around 50 m longer than the existing Pelamis P1, and is designed to be considerably more efficient than the first generation device.