Weekly Intelligence Brief

Narec to work with Mace

16 December 2009

Narec, the New and Renewable Energy Centre, has chosen Mace to undertake the project management of the Marine Test Bed facility in Blyth, Northumberland.

The facility will enable testing of marine drive systems and other wave energy device components.

The Mace team will work with the client initially to ascertain the robustness of the work they have undertaken to date on the marine turbine test bed and then to help Narec develop the tender packages required to assist in awarding implementation contracts.

Mace has appointed Royal Haskoning as sub-contractor to undertake the engineering aspect of the commission. The Mace appointment has resulted from the Buying Solutions Framework.

In July this year, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) named Narec, EMEC and Wave Hub as beneficiaries of strategic innovation funding to support each of their activities and to further the development of the marine renewables industry. For Narec, £10 million of funding was granted for Project Nautilus – a rotary test rig (available from March 2011) – with supporting infrastructure, software modeling capability and technical expertise to satisfy the growing demand from industry for specialist marine renewables drive train development.

For its part, Narec has been expanding its offshore renewables team. An immediate focus for a number of the new recruits will be to work on the development of a new £10 million marine renewables drive train test rig, Project Nautilus, which received funding from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in July of this year.  The new 3MW facility will be built on the existing campus in Blyth and will provide a simulated testing environment for new prototypes to accelerate the development of new wave and tidal devices onshore, before they are ready to be deployed in the open sea.

Read more:

Narec: http://social.tidaltoday.com/search/node/Narec