The SEENEOH tidal test site, located in the heart of the French city of Bordeaux, has been inaugurated on March 1, 2018. During the occasion, the French developer of hydrokinetic technology for both river and ocean application, HydroQuest, launched its first turbine to be tested at the site.
Located on the Garonne river, the SEENEOH tidal test site features three testing berths designed to test tidal devices with either mounted or floating fixation type.
The site, whose total costs reach €2.4 million, became fully operational early in March 2017, when the final testing berth, a 50-tonne floating platform named Bilbao, was connected to the grid.
All three testing berths are connected to the onshore substation through their export cables, with a grid connection that has a total capacity of 250kW.
During the inauguration, as the first company to use the test site – HydroQuest launched its tidal turbine which has been deployed at SEENEOH since January 2018.
To remind, HydroQuest announced back in June 2017 that it plans to test four bi-directional turbines with the capacity of 80kW on the Bilbao testing barge.
The company is developing hydrokinetic technology for both river and ocean application, and was recently selected by the French Agency for Environment and Energy Management (ADEME) to develop a 2MW in-river tidal energy project on the river Rhône in the eastern France that will feature 39 of its river turbines.
Also, late in 2016, ADEME chose HydroQuest, and Constructions Mécaniques de Normandie (CMN), to jointly install a 1MW ocean hydrokinetic tidal turbine off Brittany, France.
HydroQuest revealed earliet it intends to test its technology at the SEENEOH site for 12 months.
The SEENEOH test site will welcome its second user this April when Irish company DesignPro deploys its 25kW hydrokinetic turbine for 12-month period of testing at the site.