Rolls-Royce takes stake in Tidal Power Project

Rolls-Royce is continuing to invest in renewable energy sources by taking a 23.5 per cent equity stake in TGL, a privately-owned company developing free stream tidal power generation capability.

Rolls-Royce is researching key technologies to provide solutions to the environmental challenges in aerospace, marine and energy markets in order to bring innovative products to market. It sees considerable synergies between the technologies and skills in its existing marine and energy businesses, and will apply these to TGL’s tidal power concept.

TGL, in which Rolls-Royce has already invested £1.5 million and technical resource, is developing 500kW and 1MW demonstrators to assess viability ahead of the development of commercial multi-unit systems for tidal power arrays.

Additional development funding has come from the UK government to support the 500kW development unit, and International Power is to be launch customer, selecting, procuring and developing sites for the initial production units.

Rolls-Royce Director - Engineering and Technology, Colin Smith, said: “The TGL concept incorporates novel installation, deployment and recovery techniques, and we believe it could lead to a cheaper, and more reliable and maintainable tidal power system than is currently available.

“TGL’s management team has experience in successfully developing tidal power demonstrators. Rolls-Royce is well placed to act as a product development partner because we have technology and experience, in some areas uniquely so, that is directly applicable to the TGL product concept.”