It's all go in Strangford Lough

Oceanflow Energy has just deployed a 1:10 scale "Evopod" device in Strangford Narrows, presumably a hop and skip away from MCT's SeaGen device. The Evopod is a semi-submersible, moored energy converter which floats and yaws to optimise turbine alignment with tidal flow.

This company's been below the radar a bit, but seems to be making good technical progress. It's leading light is Graham Mackie, last seen as Technical Director at Wavegen, and founder of renewable energy consultancy Overberg (which has now morphed into Oceanflow.

Looking at Oceanflow's website, it appears that the plan is to develop a 1.5 MW evopod design.

MCT exports power to the Grid

MCT has now joined the exclusive club of marine renewables developers who have exported power to the Grid. See their press release here.

The exciting and different thing about MCT's news, relative to earlier announcements from OpenHydro, WaveGen's Limpet, Ponte de Archimedes and a few others, is that the Sea Gen is a commercially sized device, with 1.2 MW installed capacity. Its competitors at this stage are in the hundreds of kW range, so this is a different level of achievement.

Well done MCT!

Don't let the windfarm spoil the view!

Just back from a trip to the Mull of Kintyre. No sign of mist rolling in from the sea, but also it's hard to accuse the windfarms on the Mull (there are at least 3 - I couldn't find two) spoiling the view.

More posts later on the trip.