The Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult’s Marine Farm Accelerator (MFA) initiative, in collaboration with Carbon Trust, may shortly launch a competitive design competition.
The objectives of the competition are to reduce the cost of the installation processes for seabed mounted tidal turbine foundations and to standardise the mechanical interface between the foundation structure and turbine.The design competition is seeking to engage a suitably qualified supplier/ suppliers/consortia in a phased design process, where the detail of the design is refined at each phase, leading to a preferred solution for the installation process and standardised interface.It is anticipated that the competition will follow the competitive dialogue process and is likely to include the following stages:
An existing panel of industry experts will participate in the review and scoring of the submissions and thereafter in the dialogue interviews. For interest only, ORE Catapult may consider in the future a similar project but targeted at other marine energy device types and/or foundation/mooring types.