Scotland to fund tidal energy pod pre-commercialisation 27 February 2014

The Scottish Government has awarded a share of the Marine Renewables Commercialisation Fund (MRCF) to the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) to support development of an integrated site characterisation and measurement platform.

Support for the MRCF Array Technology Innovation Programme will enable EMEC to further develop, test and validate its Integrated Marine Energy Measurement Platform – a seabed pod designed to measure a variety of tidal flow parameters, such as at EMEC's Fall of Warness test site, off the island of Eday, in Orkney.

The project aims to provide a way of gathering information about interactions between marine energy devices and marine wildlife. It is expected to accelerate deployment of commercial-scale wave and tidal stream energy as it helps to reduce costs and risk.

Making real time data feeds available to developers will also help them to predict operations and maintenance events likely to be required.

The pod combines onshore and offshore subsea components, including active sonar, acoustic doppler profiler, hydrophones, and conductivity, temperature, density and turbidity sensors, as well as marine radar, met station, and vessel tracking.

Jennifer Norris, research director at EMEC, says the new project will review lessons from the initial prototype deployment in 2012, in order to upgrade the pod and integrate supporting data streams.

The data generated from this demonstration will also enable the industry to address some of the current key knowledge gaps related to yield assessment, yield optimisation and more accurate device performance, she says.

"This project brings together a range of cutting edge and more standard technologies which, for the first time, have been configured together to provide an uninterrupted data set," states Norris.

"The EMEC tidal test site is subject to peak spring tides of up to four metres per second – very challenging tidal flows, which are notoriously difficult to work in. So there have been various challenges to overcome in the design, build, operation and deployment of the pod."

Brian Tinham

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The European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) Ltd

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