Marine energy projects

Wednesday, July 23, 2008 A commercial-scale underwater turbine that generates electricity from tidal streams has just been plugged into the UK national grid at Strangford Lough, in Northern Ireland. The SeaGen trial when running at full power (staring at 150kW) will have an output of 1,200 kW (enough for about 1,000 homes).

Much closer to home, Crest Energy has applied for resource consent to construct a marine turbine project in the Kaipara Harbour for which it has recently received government funding to deploy three turbines, as the first stage of the plan for commercial-scale electricity generation (eventually 200 turbines). Christchurch-based Neptune Power (who spoke at ECan recently) has consent from Greater Wellington to place a test turbine in Cook Strait (v different from Crest’s in design) and will also receive some funding from the Marine Energy Deployment Fund.