Scotrenewables Tidal Power’s SR2000 floating tidal turbine has reached full-rated power at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney.
After undergoing grid-connected commissioning works in December last year, the SR2000 was re-connected to its subsea cable in a connection operation that took under an hour.
All offshore operations have been delivered with small crew transfer vessels or locally based workboats, Scotrenewables said.
Following the energization, the 500 tonne floating tidal turbine started generation and power export to the local Orkney grid.
Since then, the turbine has been undergoing a phased testing program leading to full, 2MW rated export capacity being achieved on April 12, 2017, according to the Scottish engineering company Scotrenewables.
Andrew Scott , CEO of Scotrenewables, 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.”
Scotrenewables said the focus now was on building generation up on the SR2000 over the immediate future and demonstrating its power performance in parallel with its low operational costs.
This deployment is already feeding into design optimizations being made under the company’s commercialization project, FloTEC , under which a lower cost SR2000 model is expected to be rolled out as a commercial offering in 2018.