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Tidal turbine on stream

LONDON: An underwater turbine that generates electricity from tidal streams was plugged into the U.K. national grid on Thursday. It marked the first time a commercial-scale underwater turbine fed power into the network and the start of a new source of renewable energy .

Tidal streams are viewed as a plentiful, predictable supply of clean energy. The most conservative estimates suggest there is at least 5 gigawatts of power in tidal streams around a country like Britain, but there could be as much as 15 GW.

The latest trial with the turbine SeaGen, at Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, generated power at 150 kW. The plan is to improve the output to 300 kW this year. When it is eventually running at full power SeaGen will have an output of 1.2 MW, enough for about 1,000 homes.

SeaGen was designed and built by the U.K.-based company Marine Current Turbines (MCT), which also installed the test device at Strangford in May.

“The best way to think of it is an underwater windmill,” said Martin Wright, managing director of MCT. Tidal stream generators harvest the energy of moving streams: the resource, unlike wind, is predictable.

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform backed Seagen with a £5.2-million grant. The cost of installing the marine turbines is £3 million for every megawatt they generate, which compares to £2.3 million a MW for offshore wind. MCT plans to build a farm of turbines before 2011. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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