EUROpean Tidal energy pilot farm focused on Industrial Design, Environmental mitigation and Sustainability

There is 10GW of predictable, high-value tidal stream energy potential in European waters, with up to 100 GW of capacity globally . This is an almost entirely unharnessed clean energy resource, with just 13 MW currently deployed . Transitioning European market leading technologies from single deployments, up to farm scale, is the next milestone in harnessing this clean, predictable, secure, domestic energy resource. EURO-TIDES has been developed specifically to address the call topic by delivering a 9.6MW farm of four 2.4MW Orbital tidal energy devices of the same series. The farm will operate in full operational conditions for 15 years, deploying in 2027. The EURO-TIDES consortium will work collaboratively to deliver six ambitious objectives and drive the sector forwards:

1. De-risking tidal energy technology development by delivering a 9.6MW pilot farm and three pilot farm system innovations; reducing Levelised Cost of Energy (LCOE) of Orbital’s floating tidal technology from €120/MWh to <€100/MWh.

2. Increase bankability and insurability by providing 17,520 hours of operational data, displaying the production of 50GWh+, and verification of key technology metrics to internationally recognised methodologies: reducing cost of capital from 10%-12% to 5%-6%.

3. Increase availability of tidal stream by creating an efficient robust, replicable, and reliable operations and maintenance programme: increasing availability to 95%+.

4. Improve market confidence by developing industrial design and manufacturing processes: increasing supply chain capacity from one device per annum to 80 devices per annum.

5. Increase knowledge of environmental impacts to ensure appropriate environmental protection and mitigation is in place: enabling safe scalability to a 100GW+ global market.

6. Making performance, reliability and behavior data collected from the demonstration publicly available: accelerating scalability, commercialisation, and deployment of a 2GW+ project pipeline.