EU Commission approves advancement of Enabling Future Arrays in Tidal project

The  Enabling Future Arrays in Tidal (EnFAIT) project has received approval from the European Commission to proceed to its next stage. The project, led by Edinburgh-based Nova Innovation in collaboration with eight European partner organisations, aims to prove that the reliability and availability of tidal energy arrays can be significantly increased and that the cost of tidal energy can be reduced by at least 40%.

The project builds on Nova’s existing operational tidal power station in Bluemull Sound off the Shetland Islands in Scotland, which was the world’s first grid-connected offshore array of tidal energy turbines. The first Nova M-100 turbine was installed in March 2016 and the second in August 2016.

Over the next four years, the EnFAIT project will extend the Bluemull Sound array to six turbines and demonstrate that high array reliability and availability can be achieved using best practice maintenance regimes. The layout of the turbines will be adjusted to enable array interactions and optimisation to be studied for the very first time at an operational tidal energy site.

Since the launch of EnFAIT last year, the existing three turbines at the Bluemell Sound site have been re-instrumented to collect improved performance data. Also, the partners have carried out extensive tidal resource monitoring activities to build up a detailed understanding of the array site and its characteristics, gained the necessary site consents and permissions for the planned expansion of the array to six turbines, and developed and verified detailed designs for the new turbines and their subsea connections.