News this week

On Friday 22 January, a very successful Marine Renewables Awareness Day was held in King Street Halls, Kirkwall. The aim of the day was to help make businesses, organisations, agencies and public bodies more aware of the opportunities that marine renewables presents for Orkney. The event, which was attended by around 70 local representatives, saw Dr Gareth Davies, Aquatera, present and facilitate discussion on the scale, locations, and types of development along with the supporting grid, port, vessel and community infrastructure that will be required as well as the potential challenges and opportunities. Eileen Linklater also gave a presentation on “EMEC: now and next” providing an overview of site activity and lessons learnt at EMEC, and Lucy Parsons, Orkney Marine Renewables Project Manager introduced a newly established local multi-agency project team to push developments forward. Given the enthusiastic response from participants we are looking forward to building on this event in future.

Also last week, a group of EMEC Board Members were delighted to be shown around the Pelamis P2 device currently under construction in Leith prior to be deployed here at EMEC. Whilst in Ireland Neil Kermode visited the OpenHydro team in Greenore to see their production facility. Pictured above are Neil Kermode and James Ives, Chief Executive, OpenHydro with the original open centre turbine in the background – the first tidal device in Scotland to generate electricity to the national grid at EMEC.