Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TIPA (Tidal Turbine Power Take-Off Accelerator)
Teaser
Tidal energy is abundant, predictable and clean, with a potential global market for tidal power of 150 – 800 TWh per year, or up to €40 billion per year. Europe accounts for 75 to 105 TWh of this total, where 105 TWh amounts to 8% of EU electricity generation in 2013...
Summary
Tidal energy is abundant, predictable and clean, with a potential global market for tidal power of 150 – 800 TWh per year, or up to €40 billion per year. Europe accounts for 75 to 105 TWh of this total, where 105 TWh amounts to 8% of EU electricity generation in 2013 (1,300 TWh/yr).
At present, creating this form of low-carbon electricity from tidal energy is expensive and as such the TiPA project will design, build and test an innovative Direct Drive Power Take-Off (PTO) solution for tidal energy turbines with a view to reducing the lifetime cost of tidal energy by 20% over a conventional PTO.
The project consortium is led by Nova Innovation, a world-leading tidal energy technology and project developer. Project partners are: SKF, Siemens, The University of Edinburgh, Technical University of Delft, Wood Group and the Center for Wind Power Drives RWTH Aachen University.
The overall objectives of the project are to:
• Design and build a high performance, direct drive PTO for a tidal energy turbine;
• Conduct tests to verify that the PTO works as designed;
• Achieve independent verification of the technology;
• Optimise the PTO design for performance, reliability and survivability; and
• Exploit, disseminate and communicate the results.
In order to verify the technology, accelerated onshore and in-sea testing of a prototype PTO will be carried out and will undergo a third party validation of the design and the test results. In parallel the project will develop a commercialisation strategy for selling and licensing the product to tidal energy technology developers, and explore potential uses outside the tidal sector, such as wave power and marine propulsion.
The results will be disseminated and exploited to maximise the benefit of this project to the ocean energy sector and to raise investor and market confidence in the emerging tidal energy industry.
Through achieving the project objectives, the TiPA project will take the tidal energy industry closer to playing a key part of Europe’s energy mix, whilst contributing towards solving climate and energy challenges.
Work performed
The TiPA project is making excellent progress towards producing a step-change in tidal energy LCoE and the consortium is confident of a timely and on-budget completion of the action.
The commission has made significant progress during the first Reporting Period (RP1) towards the overall aim of the project which is to improve performance, reliability and verify survivability of a novel direct drive Power Take-Off (PTO) system for tidal turbines.
RP1 has seen a number of project tasks and objectives completed as planned with some highlights being the completion of the PTO design, verification of the design, establishment of reliability frameworks/models and commencement of the PTO build.
The project consortium has been working well together, with good interactions taking place between all partners across all work packages. The project is progressing well and within the available budget, which has been monitored regularly during RP1 and will continue to be monitored and managed as the project progresses.
A number of communication platforms have been created during RP1 to enable the dissemination of the project outputs. A project website has been created to raise awareness of the project and to provide a platform to share the public deliverables.
A number of industry events have also been attended where the potential benefits of the novel PTO system or initial findings have been shared.
Of the 44 deliverables due to be submitted as part of the total project, 20 have been submitted to the European Commission during RP1. This has resulted in the achievement of 3 project milestones within RP1:
• M1 - Test plan & specification complete
• M2 - Test system design complete
• M3 - Market Analysis Complete
Final results
The impacts the TIPA project will have are as follows:
• Significantly increasing technology performance;
• Reducing the technological risks for the next development stages;
• Reducing the life-cycle environmental impact;
• Nurturing the development of the industrial capacity to produce components and systems and opening of new opportunities;
• Contributing to the strengthening of the European industrial technology base, thereby creating growth and jobs in Europe;
• Reducing renewable energy technologies installation time and cost and/or operational costs, hence easing the deployment of renewable energy sources within the energy mix;
• Increasing the reliability and lifetime while decreasing operation and maintenance costs, hence creating new business opportunities; and
• Contributing to solving the global climate and energy challenges.
Website & more info
More info: http://www.tipa-h2020.eu/.