Tidal devices - performance review

Following the Scottish Renewables Marine Energy conference in Inverness, a couple of interesting performance metrics emerged.

Atlantis recently announced that the MeyGen project had generated 700 MWhr during August, apparently from 2 AndritzHydroHammerfest (AHH) turbines.  We thought it might be interesting to extract an average capacity factor from these figures.

2 turbines at 1.5 MW - 3 MW installed capacity.

Number of hours in August: 31 * 24 = 744

Total potential output = 744 hours * 3 MW = 2.232 GWhr

Actual output: 700 MWhr

Capacity factor: 0.7/2.232 = 31.4%

This may be a slight over-estimate, as the third AHH turbine may have made a minor contribution late in the month following its re-installation, but even with that proviso, these are not bad figures for a full month (i.e. neaps and springs).

ScotRenewables made a similar claim - that its 2.0 MW SR2000 had generated 116 MWh over week.  This equates to a capacity factor of 116/(24*2*7) = 34.5%, and we understand that this period was intermediate between spring and neap tide.

As runtimes extend and reliability improves, we hope to see these numbers go up too.