The world’s most powerful tidal turbine, developed and manufactured by Scottish engineering company Scotrenewables Tidal Power Ltd, has reached full rated power at the European Marine Energy Centre, Orkney.

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 energisation, the 500 tonne floating tidal turbine commenced generation and power export to the local Orkney grid. Since then the turbine has been undergoing a phased testing programme leading to full, 2MW rated export capacity being achieved on 12th 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.

The deployment is already feeding into design optimisations being made under the company’s commercialisation project, FloTEC, which will see an even lower cost SR2000 model rolled out as a commercial offering in 2018.

SRTP has one of the strongest investor partnerships in the marine renewables sector, including  energy firm TOTAL, the Norwegian based Fred. Olsen Group, the venture capital division of Swiss power and automation multinational, ABB Technology Ventures, Scottish Enterprise and DP Energy, one of the world's leading developers of tidal arrays, have all got stakes in the company.

Simon de Pietro, CEO, DP Energy, said:

“This is a significant milestone for Scotrenewables and for tidal energy and we look forward to seeing the deployment of the technology in commercial arrays in the coming years as part of the overall solution for the marine energy sector”.

Kurt Kaltenegger, Head of Technology, ABB Technology Ventures, added that the SR2000 project offers a compelling demonstration of how Scotrenewables can deliver predictable, cost effective, low carbon energy through its propriety floating tidal platform technology.