EU awards €750,000 for collaborative tidal power development 24 September 2014

Tidal energy firms Minesto and Atlantis Resources have been granted €750,000 from the Eurostars Programme, funded by the European Union, for R&D to reduce the cost of installations.

The funds – which will be matched by the companies – will be used to create cost effective, high reliability tidal turbine blades and wings of composite materials.

Anders Jansson, cheif executive at Minesto, says collaboration between tidal energy developers is essential to speed up developments and impact the global renewable energy arena.

"Minesto and Atlantis introduce a wealth of experience, and our complimentary positions in tidal energy will facilitate extensive knowledge exchange that would not be viable via other technology collaborations," insists Jansson.

"The funding also proves that Eurostars has identified marine energy as a strong future supplier of clean energy," he adds.

"Constant innovation and collaboration in the development of tidal turbines will be critical to the commercialisation of the industry globally," comments Atlantis CEO Tim Cornelius.

"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," he adds.

Cornelius says that a better understanding of the wing material, its behaviour and likely failure modes should lead to better designs and hence reliability – with 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."

Eurostars is a programme that supports research-based small and medium enterprises,. It provides funding for transnational innovation projects, the products of which are then rapidly commercialised.

The Eurostars programme is publicly financed by the European Union with a total budget of 1.14 billion euros.

Brian Tinham

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