Specialised engineering services company Velocious is acting on its plans to take its design expertise from the oil and gas industry to the renewables market.
The company, which topped this year’s WA Business News Rising Stars awards, has been commissioned by Atlantis Resources to design the connector system for the world’s biggest tidal turbine, located in the UK.
Velocious also designed the mooring connection system for Carnegie Wave Energy’s prototype CETO3.
“With projects now targeting wave and tidal energy reserves, we can transfer skills and knowledge from the oil and gas sector which has a 40-year plus head start on installing and maintaining complex devices in the marine environment,” Velocious chief executive Brett Silich said.
“Why allow the fledgling industry to remake costly mistakes when the valuable lessons are so readily available and transferable from organisations like Velocious?”
The tidal turbine is 22.5 metres high, weighs 1,300 tonnes and is in 35 metres of water at European Marine Energy Centre’s tidal test facility on the north-west coast of the UK. It has 18-metre diameter rotors and a power output of 1 megawatt.
Carnegie’s CETO3 unit recently underwent trials off Garden Island and Mr Silich said Velocious designed the system used by divers to attach the power generating unit to the pre-installed seabed mooring point.
“The system worked flawlessly with the equipment conforming exactly to the technical specification,” Mr Silich said.
“With divers and large buoyant components being deployed in shallow water, equipment has to be designed to work reliably to minimise the dynamic risk exposure to the entire installation team.”
Carnegie’s first grid-connected, revenue-generating power project will be at the same location as the CETO 3 unit deployment off Garden Island.
The company has said it is moving into the detailed design phase and will secure all approvals, permits and offtake arrangements necessary to allow the project to progress, with construction forecast to start in 2012.
The company spent 18 months and $20 million proving the economics of the technology, including a $2 million state government grant.
Carnegie has also completed a detailed site evaluation and conceptual design study with its CETO technology for a proposed 5-megawatt commercial demonstration project in Irish waters.
Carnegie’s Dublin-based executive director of European business development, Kieran O’Brien, said: “Completion of this project is an important first step in the development of a CETO commercial demonstration project in Atlantic waters off Ireland.”