Scotrenewables Tidal Power’s SR2000 tidal turbine has generated over 18MWh of energy within a continuous 24-hour testing period at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC).
Speaking of the performance level achievement which, according to Scotrenewables, matches established offshore wind turbines, the company’s Chief Executive Andrew Scott said:
“Recognizing we are still in the early stages of our demonstration program this is a tremendously reassuring level of performance to be achieving, one which provides further confidence in our technology’s ability to deliver a significant step reduction in the cost of energy from tidal stream and meet our future customers’ needs.”
The SR2000 floating tidal turbine reached its full-rated capacity of 2MW in April at EMEC, where it is undergoing a grid-connected testing program. The testing is focused on demonstrating power and hydrodynamic performance of the patented floating turbine technology in parallel with a low cost maintenance and vessel strategy.
Jonathan Meason , Scotrenewables’ Engineering Manager said: “The SR2000 is providing invaluable experience and validation of our engineering – both of which are informing the optimisation exercise which we are undertaking within our flagship Horizon 2020 project; where we are confident we can considerably increase the performance from the system in parallel with reducing costs and risks.”
Scotrenewables’ EU funded Horizon 2020 project, dubbed FloTEC , is a collaborative industry and supply chain initiative aimed at further reducing the cost of energy from the company’s technology and providing the basis to begin commercial sales.
The SR2000 was engineered and built with a 16 meter rotor diameter for each of its 1MW turbines.
The improvements under the FloTEC project include increasing diameters to 20 meters, using composite blades developed with project partners EireComposites. It is expected that this would increase the annual yield from turbines by over 50%.