The Energy Technologies Institute is a UK based company formed from global industries and the UK Government. The ETI brings together projects and partnerships that create affordable, reliable, clean energy for heat, power and transport. The ETI has announced details of a new £8 million project designed to make wave and tidal energy more competitive.

An £8 million project that will produce tools capable of accurately estimating the energy yield of major wave and tidal stream energy has been approved by the Energy Technologies Institute.

Performance Assessment of Wave and Tidal Array Systems (PerAWaT), a project led by Garrad Hassan, and including EDF Energy, EON, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Oxford, Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Manchester will develop a series of models to predict the performance of wave and tidal stream generator arrays.

ETI Chief Executive Dr David Clarke said: “Although the UK has huge marine potential, investment is being held back by uncertainty about the overall costs involved and the potential returns on investment in wave and tidal technologies.”

“This project will deliver greatly improved modelling tools to provide more accurate forecasting of energy yields and reduce the uncertainty and investment risk faced by project developers when planning large scale wave and tidal energy schemes.”

“It will build on existing knowledge to accelerate the development of sophisticated tools that will become essential as the marine energy industry matures.”

“No single company or university would be capable of doing this work alone and the ETI has played a key role in bringing together a consortium of experts to deliver this critical work. It is an important step to unlocking the considerable potential of marine energy.”

Garrad Hassan Marine Renewables Group Leader Dr Robert Rawlinson-Smith added: “Deployment of large scale arrays of marine energy conversion devices will only occur when project developers have sufficient confidence in the return on their investment.

“ The ETI core objective of accelerating the commercial deployment of energy technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions will be addressed by this project as it will both establish and validate numerical models capable of predicting the performance of wave & tidal energy converters (WECs and TECs) when operating in arrays.”

“Once established, the models will enhance levels of confidence in the design of WEC and TEC arrays and therefore accelerate their large scale deployment. By accelerating deployment rates the project will directly address the ETI Marine Programme outcome goal of increasing deployment to 2GW by 2020 and 30GW by 2050.”

“The PerAWaT consortium brings together universities, utilities and an engineering consultancy which, in combination, will provide the skills and facilities necessary to significantly enhance our understanding of the performance of wave and tidal stream energy farms and encapsulate that understanding in robust validated numerical models for use by the wider industry.”

There is currently no software package or validated method of estimating the average annual energy production of a wave or tidal stream energy farm.

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