Scotland marine energy presses forward

Scottish Enterprise has announced the successful completion of a number of key projects in the marine energy sector.

Supported by £4.8 million of grants from the Scottish Enterprise Marine Energy RD&D Fund programme, Scotland continues to advance the marine energy sector through the completion of three projects.

OpenHydro, a DCNS company, completed a £1.8 million WATERS-funded project to design, build and test a power conversion unit for its open-centre turbine, which has been developed and tested at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) over the last decade. OpenHydro’s open-centre turbine was designed to be deployed directly on the seabed and has proven to be reliable in a variety of sea conditions at EMEC, according to Scottish Enterprise.

Edinburgh-based wave energy company Albatern has completed £600,000 WATERS-funded project to build and demonstrate its WaveNET wave energy array off the west coast of Scotland. The development and deployment of a working WaveNET array of six units represents a significant achievement for the wave energy sector in bringing forward commercial solutions.

Also, Scottish Enterprise’s £2.4 million Tidal Energy Array Cabling Project has been completed with the demonstration of two innovative cabling solutions that have a strong potential to lower costs in this critical area for the tidal energy industry

Fergus Ewing, Scottish Energy Minister, said: “These recent successes show that there is still progress being made despite it being a challenging time for the industry. Through initiatives like WATERS and Wave Energy Scotland, we will continue to support technology developers to amass the knowledge and expertise they need to build a world-leading marine energy industry.”