Simec Atlantis has landed a £1.5m grant to start building a subsea hub, where multiple tidal turbines can connect.
The aim is to get more turbines in the water, both its own and those of other developers.
The money comes from the Scottish government’s Saltire Tidal Energy Fund and the grant means Atlantis can award its engineering services division a £2.4 million EPC contract to do the work, scheduled to take place this year.
When complete, the hub – effectively a multipoint socket – will enable multiple turbines to connect to a single export cable.
Atlantis CEO Tim Cornelius thanked the government for its ongoing support and said the hub would be “the first of its kind globally” and would help reduce tidal power’s high costs. The hub could also be used by the floating offshore wind market, he added.
“The next phase of MeyGen, which will supply ocean energy to a large data centre to be built in Scotland, requires us to deliver cost competitive energy to our future customers and the use of subsea hubs to reduce the number of export cables required to deliver this power from the 40 x 2MW turbines we plan to install is central to our plans,” said Cornelius.
“This is a wonderful development for the MeyGen project, our ATES division and the tidal power sector in the UK.”
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