EMEC Tidal open for business!

I spent Friday on the Orcadian island of Eday, watching Alex Salmond open the EMEC Tidal facility. If you look at this carefully, you can see the OpenHydro turbine in the background, just next to Neil Kermode, EMEC's MD. (Alex managed to find some schoolchildren to pose with later on in Eday Comunity School, but I didn't get a photo of that.)

We took a ferry from Kirkwall to the island, looping around the OpenHydro turbine which has been in the Falls of Warness since earlier this year. The picture clearly shows the bow wave around the device in an equinoctal spring tide - about 7 knots.

Marine renewables devices

Over the last few weeks, I've had the opportunity to look at three different (distinctly different) marine renewables devices, and the thing that's really impressed me is how much more credible they are than similar devices were only two years ago.

The amount and quality of engineering thinking, simplification and improvement is striking.

The EMEC Board took a trip out to Eday, to inspect the tidal site and the OpenHydro turbine (photo above) this week, and it was really exciting to see this impressive piece of kit in the Eday tidal stream. It wasn't even one of the three I've mentioned above!