Orbital Marine Power teams up with Black & Veatch to enhance its tidal turbine system
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
A Scottish engineering firm is using digital twinning to help improve its world-leading tidal turbine design to help make the technology competitive.
Orbital Marine Power has appointed Black & Veatch as lead engineering partner as part of its €5 million research and design programme.
The four-year programme, supported by the INTERREG France (Channel) England TIGER project, will build on Orbital’s unique floating tidal turbine technology, the O2, to develop innovations capable of accelerating cost reductions for tidal stream energy.
Black & Veatch has created a digital twin of Orbital’s current turbine design that allows the teams to model turbine improvements and identify which advances deliver the lowest cost of energy across the entire turbine lifecycle.
Orbital CEO Andrew Scott said: “A central strand to the development of our O2 technology was a vision for the future and to ensure we created a product which is well future-proofed for ongoing innovation. So it is great to have started this work in more detail and that the initial assessments from Black and Veatch back up our own projections that the correct configuration of technology can make tidal stream energy competitive with established sectors.”
Robbie Gibson, Black & Veatch renewable energy services director for Europe, said: “We’re delighted that Orbital has selected us to support their development programme as we see the technology as having huge potential to deliver cost competitive low-carbon energy and our team has a huge amount of experience it can bring to assist this journey.”
