#TIDAL TURBINE FULL#

Typically, tidal turbines are designed to run in high sea states at full power until a wave height threshold is reached. To ramp all the way to two megawatts, the engineers had to change the way they approached harvesting energy from the tide. “That gave us some extra capacity,” Hopley said. In essence, they’d over designed for rougher waters.

With the AR1500 at work in the water, the company found that load spikes and fluctuations were not as great as they had predicted. “It was, ‘If in doubt, put in a little more provision than you need to’ because the cost of failure was far greater than the cost of being slightly too expensive.” Thankfully, the AR1500 proved to be plenty rugged.

“How much spare capacity is there in the existing design, and then how could we change the control philosophy to increase its power and its annual yield?”įor You: Bacteria-Powered Solar Cells Are Ideal for Cloudy Climates “The approach with this turbine was based on asking ourselves the following question: how do we get more out of what we’ve currently got,” said Nigel Hopley, the company’s mechanical engineering manager. But getting the same power out the same size required some serious engineering ingenuity. In fact, it’s the same size as its predecessor, the AR1500, a 1.5-MW turbine. It is not, however, the largest in size, but in power-it has a maximum output of 2 MW. At 2-megawatt, AR2000 will be the world’s largest and most powerful single rotor tidal turbine. Their AR2000 will be the largest single rotor tidal turbine that the seas have ever turned. The folks at SIMEC Atlantis Energy have created just that. If you want a piece of it, you need a massive turbine. And with that other massive thing, the moon, it creates tides of massive power.

Tidal turbine