Scotrenewables Tidal Power – which has built the largest and most powerful tidal current turbine in the world – has launched a new funding round to commercialise its 2MW floating energy converter.
It has appointed financial advisors Simmons, the energy specialists of US investment bank Piper Jaffray, to lead the investment process from its Aberdeen office.
The move follows a successful test programme over the past 12 months, culminating in the SR2000 producing more than 116 MWh in under a week of continuous generation at the European Marine Energy Test Centre in Orkney.
The grid-connected turbine supplied 7% of Orkney’s electricity demand over this time with shorter periods where that contribution exceeded 25% of demand. In recent days, the SR2000 has been generating more than 20MWh per day, including 6MWh in a single tide.
A Scotrenewables Tidal Power spokesman explained: “Given the significant progress we are making with our SR2000 floating tidal system, and our pipeline of projects in UK and overseas waters, we have appointed Simmons & Company International in Aberdeen to assist us with a funding round to secure new equity investment.
“This new investment will support the completion of our commercialisation programme and deliver our first commercial tidal arrays.”
Scotrenewables’ existing shareholders include ABB, DP Energy, Fred Olsen, Total and the Scottish Government.
The company has been selected by the European Commission to lead on the engineering and delivery of an enhanced model of the SR2000 machine. Leveraging £7m Horizon 2020 funding ,Scotrenewables will lead an industrial consortium to optimise the SR2000 under the “FloTEC” project which is scheduled to run until 2019
The company currently employs 26 people in Orkney and Edinburgh.
7 Nov 2017
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