In 2002 Orbital Marine Power, then known as Scotrenewables Tidal Power, set up its stall in Orkney with a view to developing an innovative floating tidal stream turbine technology.
Nine years later its pioneering efforts bore fruit, with the launch of the SR250, a 250 kilowatt prototype turbine. This was the first, large-scale floating tidal turbine grid connected in the world.
As Andrew Scott, the chief executive officer at Orbital explains, the success of that first prototype enabled the company to raise further equity financing and in 2014 it began work on its first full scale system, the SR2000, a two-megawatt turbine.
“We launched the SR2000 from the Harland and Wolff Shipyard in Belfast in 2016. It was transported up to Orkney and connected to the grid at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) site. It went on to be a hugely successful test programme for us,” he says. In one continuous grid connected installation from August 2017 to September 2018 the SR2000 generated over 3.25 gigawatt hours of electricity.
“It generated more power in those twelve months than the entire wave and tidal industry in Scotland had generated in the twelve years preceding the launch of the turbine,” Scott comments.
At times over the test programme the single tidal turbine was meeting around a quarter of the electricity demand of the whole of the Orkney Islands. “This was an outstandingly successful project for us and a real validation of the technology at both an engineering and a practical level,” Scott says.
Orbital has built on that success. At the end of 2018 it secured a fresh round of equity finance with successful Scottish entrepreneur Matt McGrath investing in the company along with a number of his family members and alongside Scottish Government via the Scottish Energy Investment Fund.
“Securing this new investment and investor has been a great boost for the business at an exciting time where it’s a real benefit having Matt’s, entrepreneurial experience and expertise,” Scott says.
“With the close of that funding round we rebranded from Scotrenewables Tidal Power to Orbital Marine Power which we see as a powerful brand for global application. And simultaneously we launched a crowd funding denture, which was essentially all about asking the UK public if it wanted to support tidal power generation by investing in our new, optimised, commercial version of the SR2000 – the Orbital O2,” Scott comments.
The crowd funding debenture was managed through the peer-to-peer funding platform Abundance which specialises in green and low carbon infrastructure investment opportunities. The offer opened in mid-October 2018 and reached its target of £7 million on 1 January this year.
“This made our peer-to-peer fund raise the largest single crowd-funded debenture in the UK to date.” Scott says.
“It is a huge endorsement of our vision and a tremendous boost for the wider tidal power generation effort. It brought some 2,500 new investors into our technology and demonstrated that the public really do want to see tidal generation playing its role in the UK energy portfolio. We are honoured with this backing and are really looking forward to delivering a huge success for all our new investors.”
Orbital is now moving into the build phase of the O2 turbine. “We’ve been placing contracts for the long lead time elements of the build. We still have some key contracts to sign off and we target having the turbine in the water and generating power next year,” Scott comments.
Some of the components for the turbine are standard “off-the-shelf” items, such as the electric drives, but all the big, steel elements of the project are bespoke.
The O2 will incorporate a number of innovations targeted at enabling both lowest capital and lowest operating costs in the sector whilst increasing yield. A key improvement on the SR2000 will be moving from 16-metre rotor diameter to a 20-metre rotor diameter with the same installed capacity. Scott explains that this will enable the new turbine to generate around 50 percent more power, on a like for like basis, than the earlier version. “This has a huge bearing on the cost of the energy produced by the system.”
Despite the success of the SR2000, and other tidal projects, Scott reckons that the overall picture for tidal generation in the UK remains challenging. “Despite consistent Scottish Government sector investment, market support for tidal energy is not a devolved power and has still not been re-instated by the UK Government. This had previously been the driver for private sector investment in developing technology and delivering projects. We have only been successful in funding the O2 because it will benefit from our ROC accredited 2MW export terminal on Orkney. This only goes to show just how vital access to suitable market support is in stimulating companies to bring forward innovative tidal solutions and projects.”
“We are engaged on a continuous basis in trying to get that message through to UK Government, but we are also actively looking outside the UK for more supportive commercial environments to take our business forward into commercial operation” he says.
While a number of countries, including the likes of Japan, France, Philippines and Indonesia, are looking seriously at tidal generation, global attention right now is focused on Canada, and in particular at the Bay of Fundy region on the east coast which holds one of the world’s largest tidal stream resource.
“The reassuring thing about Canadian efforts, centred around harnessing the huge natural resource they have, is that they have supportive federal and state funding initiatives focused around bringing a tidal industry through the commercialisation journey and into a meaningful industry generating significant amounts of clean, predictable power in parallel with a huge, new supply chain opportunity.”
For more information visit www.orbitalmarine.com
This article appeared in The Herald's annual review of Scotland's Renewable Sector on the 30th April 2019. CLICK HERE to read the full report.
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