Engineering news
The aim is to create a French supply chain, with possible regions including Brittany, Normandy, Acquitaine, Pays-de-la-Loire and Hauts-de-France.
France is starting to become a serious player in the tidal energy market, considered to be the second largest tidal power resource in Europe after the UK.
In 2016, Dublin-based OpenHydro firm deployed two tidal turbines offshore at EDF’s Paimpol-Bréhat north Brittany site. It has begun exporting 1MW of energy to the French electrical grid.
Meanwhile, the Normandie Hydro pilot project, supported by the French government, will see seven turbines installed at the Raz Blanchard site off the north-west tip of the Contentin peninsula in Normandy by 2018.
Atlantis said it hopes to build new arrays in French tidal areas including at the Raz Blanchard site.
The company is behind the world’s largest tidal turbine array in the Pentland Firth in Scotland. The installation of the first four 1.5MW turbines that make up Phase 1A began in September 2016. The turbines stand 15m tall, boast blades of 18m in diameter and weigh almost 200 tonnes each. Three of the units were built by Andritz and the fourth is a AR1500 Atlantis turbine.
MeyGen Phase 1B, also known as Project Stroma, will start construction in 2017 and first power is expected in 2018. It will be built next to the existing 6MW MeyGen Phase 1A project, which delivered first power to the grid in November last year. Together, Phases 1A and 1B complete the beginning of a full scale commercial project at the site, which has an awarded seabed lease for almost 400MW of installed capacity.
Tim Cornelius, chief executive of Atlantis, said he hopes to apply the knowledge from MeyGen to project sites in France, such as Raz Blanchard.
Potential of tidal energy
Unlike other forms of intermittent renewable energy such as wind and solar, tidal energy is predictable and lessens the risk of overloading the electricity grid.
However, financial pressures associated with testing and commercialising the technology have seen UK companies such as Tidal Energy Ltd go into administration – this was less than a year after developing and testing a 400KW turbine in Pembrokeshire, Wales, called DeltaStream. The tidal energy sector is still seen as one that needs a lot of government support and investment to be commercially viable.
However, Atlantis has emerged as a giant in the UK tidal turbine sector with its MeyGen project in Scotland.
This year the MeyGen project will move into its next phase and begin construction of four more 1.5MW tidal turbines, following confirmation of £14 million (€16.8 million) investment in December 2016.
This next phase of the MeyGen site development is seen as an important step in demonstrating progress to a lower cost of energy for tidal stream. It will see the construction of four SeaGen20 1.5MW subsea turbines that will have larger diameter rotors to capture more energy from the tidal flow, as well as optimised turbine power ratings. This will take the MeyGen project to 12MW of capacity.
Meanwhile, earlier this yaer Atlantis and French company Ideol, a leader in floating offshore wind technology, entered into a strategic agreement aiming to develop a 1.5 GW pipeline of floating offshore wind projects in the UK. It is also developing 150MW tidal turbine array in Indonesia.