Press release: SR2000 hits peak power at EMEC

SR2000 testing at EMEC’s Fall of Warness test site (Credit: Scotrenewables)

The world’s most powerful tidal turbine, developed and manufactured by Scottish engineering company Scotrenewables Tidal Power Limited, has reached full rated power at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), 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 2017.

Andrew Scott, CEO at Scotrenewables 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.”

Neil Kermode, Managing Director at EMEC said:

“Everybody at EMEC offers their congratulations to Scotrenewables in reaching peak power on the SR2000. This milestone is testament to years of hard work and dedication shown by the Scotrenewables team. It further demonstrates that through dogged, unrelenting innovation tidal energy is getting ever closer to becoming part of our carbon free energy mix.”

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.

This 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.

Scotrenewables’ shareholders are evidently excited by the progress being made:

• 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, said: “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.”
• Julien Pouget, ‎Senior Vice President Renewables, Total, said: “For Total, contributing to the development of renewable energies is as much a strategic choice as an industrial responsibility. As a shareholder of Scotrenewables Tidal Power Limited we are proud to take part in a project that demonstrates how powerful utility scale tidal turbines can be deployed and maintained with low cost, locally based vessels towards a step-change cost reduction for the tidal energy sector.”
• Founder and Director, Barry Johnston, said: “After developing the initial concept more than a decade ago, it’s fantastic to now see the latest evolution of the tidal turbine proving it’s low cost power generation capability onsite connected to the UK national grid.”