The Enabling Future Arrays in Tidal (EnFAIT) project in Scotland — led by Nova Innovation Ltd — has secured the go-ahead from the European Commission to move to the next stage of development.

Having secured 14.9 million euros of EU funding last year, it will add three turbines to Nova’s existing tidal-power array in Bluemull Sound, Shetland.

The layout of the turbines will be adjusted to allow array interactions and optimisation to be studied for the first
time at an operating tidal-energy site.

The nine EnFAIT project partners — including industrial, academic and research organisations from the UK, Germany, France and Belgium — aim to demonstrate that high reliability and availability can be achieved with best-practice maintenance regimes.

Simon Forrest, CEO of Nova Innovations (www.novainnovation.com), said: “Working with our partners, we’ve made significant progress towards putting in place the project’s operational and technical foundations, and we are extremely excited to be moving to the next stage, in which we’ll focus on scaling up and optimising the array configuration.”

The project started in July 2017 and will run to June 2022.

The list of activities completed in the first year of the project includes the re-instrumentation of the existing three turbines to gather improved performance data, tidal-resource monitoring to build up a detailed understanding of the array site and its characteristics, securing site consents and permits for the planned three-turbine expansion, and the development and verification of the turbine and sub-sea connection designs.