OpenHydro

Irish tidal energy company OpenHydro has announced that it has secured a major contract to develop a tidal energy pilot project for a public utility provider in Washington State in the U.S. The announcement was made today at Stanford University in the U.S. where the Irish Technology Leaders Silicon Valley Awards are taking place.

The pilot project, which has received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Water Power Projects, involves the installation of up to three tidal turbines in the Puget Sound, which will be connected to the electricity grid via subsea cables. OpenHydro will install the turbines using its purpose-built installation barge, the OpenHydro Installer, the world’s first specialist barge for installing seabed mounted tidal turbines. Installation is expected to begin as early as 2011.

The contract with Snohomish County Public Utility District, the United States’ twelfth largest publicly owned power utility, is to develop a tidal energy project in the Admiralty Inlet region of the Puget Sound, the second largest estuary in the United States with a shoreline of 3,790 kilometres.

“OpenHydro’s vision is to develop arrays of tidal turbines, silently and invisibly generating renewable energy under the world’s oceans. This is a significant contract for our business and it marks a further step toward achieving that goal. We truly believe that tidal energy will make a considerable contribution towards meeting SnoPUD’s renewable energy targets and we are extremely excited to be working with such a visionary partner,” said James Ives, Chief Executive, OpenHydro.

“We’re thrilled to partner withOpenHydro to develop a clean, emission-free energy source that has the potential to make a significant contribution to meeting our region’s growing energy needs,” said PUD General Manager Steve Klein. “Tidal energy can be sited right here in Western Washington and easily integrated into our existing electrical system without requiring hundreds of miles of new transmission lines.”

OpenHydro

OpenHydro is an Irish tidal energy technology company whose business is the design and manufacture of tidal turbines and turbine deployment equipment for generating renewable energy from tidal streams. In May 2008,OpenHydro became the first company to deliver tidal generated electricity to the UK’s national grid.

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