Scottish engineering company Scotrenewables Tidal Power has reached full rated power from its 2MW tidal energy device at the European Marine Energy Centre, Orkney. It is the highest power tidal energy device in the market.
After undergoing grid connected commissioning works prior to Christmas last year, the SR2000 was re-connected to its subsea cable in a low cost connection operation that took under an hour. All offshore operations have been delivered with small crew transfer vessels or locally based workboats.
Following 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 12 April.
Andrew Scott, CEO, 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. Achieving this industry milestone is a goal the team at Scotrenewables have worked tirelessly towards for a long time - the credit lies with them for these fantastic achievements.”
The company is focused on building generation up on the SR2000 over the immediate future and demonstrating its power performance in parallel with its unique low operational costs.
This deployment is already feeding into design optimizations being made under the company’s commercialization project, FloTEC, which will see an even lower cost SR2000 model rolled out as a commercial offering in 2018.