MARINE Current Turbines (MCT) has raised £3.5million from an investor group led by Carbon Trust Investments Limited and including Bank Invest, EDF Energy, High Tide and a group of significant private investors. The funding is intended to help MCT in its plans to deploy what it hopes will be the UK’s first commercial tidal energy farm in domestic waters within the next two years.
The British firm is the developer of SeaGen, the world’s first and presently largest grid-connected system that extracts energy from tidal currents. According to the Carbon Trust, part of the new funding will support MCT’s first deployment of SeaGen in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough, which has now been operating for more than six months, apparently successfully.
CT CEO Tom Delay said MCT’s “proven technology” was now ready to be deployed in a commercial-scale tidal farm – a UK first.
However, he warned that the current economic climate had created difficulties for companies such as this operating within a capital-intensive sector and that the trust was pleased to put its shoulder behind the firm.
Martin Wright, MD at MCT, claims his company has “established clear water” ahead of its rivals.
“We see this significant investment, allied by the Government’s actions to encourage tidal and wave energy, giving the company a massive boost to realise the commercial opportunities that exist in the UK as well as overseas markets,” Wright said in a statement.
MCT installed the world’s first commercial-scale tidal-stream turbine, the 1.2MW SeaGen, in Strangford Lough, in Northern Ireland, in 2008. The device is now operating remotely and generating power that is being sold to ESB Independent Energy under a power purchase agreement, helping to supply businesses across Northern Ireland with renewable electricity.
The Carbon Trust’s investment is drawn from a new £18million fund provided by the Department of Energy and Climate Change which was announced by the trust in November 2009.