Marine energy companies Minesto and Atlantis Resources Ltd have been awarded €750,000 from the EU's Eurostars Programme to reduce the cost of tidal power plants by creating cost effective high reliability tidal turbine blades and wings of composite materials.

The funding is awarded to a project that aims to reduce the cost of tidal energy and is a unique collaboration between two different marine energy developers on the global arena. Total project value is €1.5 million of which €750,000 is covered by the funds from the Eurostars Programme.

The project is a collaboration between two tidal energy developers: Minesto and Atlantis, both with advanced marine energy technologies that will complement each other rather than compete. Collaboration between different tidal energy developers is essential to speed up time-to-market for power plants that could make an impact on the global renewable energy arena.

“This is a truly unique collaboration between tidal energy developers,” said Anders Jansson CEO of Minesto. “Minesto and Atlantis introduce a wealth of experience from the development of marine energy plants and our complimentary positions in the tidal energy market will facilitate extensive knowledge exchange that would not be viable via other technology developer collaborations. The funding also proves that Eurostars has identified marine energy as a strong future supplier of clean energy.”

The Eurostars programme supports research-based small and medium enterprises, which develop innovative products, processes and services, to gain competitive advantage. Eurostars does this by providing funding for transnational innovation projects; the products of which are then rapidly commercialized. The Eurostars programme is publicly financed by the European Union with a total budget of 1.14 billion euros.

Atlantis CEO, Tim Cornelius commented: “Constant innovation and collaboration in the development of tidal turbines will be critical to the commercialisation of the industry globally. This funding and consequent partnership will enable us to design and build even better turbines, capable of operating at even greater efficiency in the most hostile of environments.”

UK-headquartered Atlantis is the owner of Meygen, the world’s largest planned tidal stream energy project.

Anders Jansson added:

“A better understanding of the material of the wing, its behaviour, and likely failure modes can lead to better design and monitoring and ultimately higher reliability and fewer expensive failures of key components. The project will conduct research allowing the design of the wing to be optimised and so improve the power plant’s performance.”

In the project, key components of Minesto’s and Atlantis’ tidal energy converters will be jointly developed. Minesto has a unique, patented and internationally awarded technology, Deep Green, with the unique ability to produce cost effective electricity from both low flow tidal and ocean currents. In this project, Minesto will further develop the wing for their innovative Deep Green technology to harness tidal flows of 1.2-2.5m/s.