Weekly Intelligence Brief

ETI approves £8m marine project

11 November 2009

The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) has finalised plans for a new £8 million project designed to make wave and tidal energy more competitive.

The project will produce tools capable of accurately estimating the energy yield of major wave and tidal stream energy. This project will deliver modelling tools to provide more accurate forecasting of energy yields and reduce the uncertainty and investment risk faced by project developers when planning large scale wave and tidal energy schemes.

Performance Assessment of Wave and Tidal Array Systems (PerAWaT), a project led by Garrad Hassan, and including EDF Energy, EON, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Oxford, Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Manchester, will develop a series of models to predict the performance of wave and tidal stream generator arrays.

ETI highlighted that the initiative is significant considering the fact that investment in the marine energy sector is being held back by uncertainty about the overall costs involved and the potential returns on investment in wave and tidal technologies.

It is expected that the models will enhance levels of confidence in the design of wave and tidal energy converters arrays and therefore accelerate their large scale deployment. By accelerating deployment rates the project will directly address the ETI Marine Programme outcome goal of increasing deployment to 2GW by 2020 and 30GW by 2050.

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Tidal energy converter: http://social.tidaltoday.com/search/node/tidal+energy+converter